Sony sells $835m PS3 CPU plant to Toshiba
Consolation prize?
20th February 2008 09:38 GMT
Sony today re-iterated its plan to sell its Cell processor chip factory to Toshiba, which will pay ¥90bn ($835m) for the facility.
Toshiba's buying the plant in Western Japan, but it'll be run by a joint-venture co-owned by the two giants. The JV was announced in October 2007, part of Sony's plan to exit the costly chip business.
The JV is due to be incorporated on 1 April, on which date it will use the plant acquired by Toshiba to punch out Cell CPUs and the RSX graphics chips - the GPU developed by Nvidia and, like Cell, used in the PlayStation 3.
Sony's partnership with Toshiba over the Cell chip is in stark contrast to the two firms' opposition over next-gen optical disc formats. Yesterday, Toshiba said it was ending production of HD DVD hardware, allowing the Sony-back Blu-ray Disc to claim victory in the format war.
Toshiba yesterday said it would focus on products like Cell and solid-state storage in the post-HD DVD world.
Toshiba plans to use Cell in future HD TVs. This past January, at the Consumer Electronics Show, it demo'd an LCD TV equipped with Cell for image processing, including decoding multiple HD video streams for picture-in-picture displays.
Print
Retweet
Intel Core i7 I7-920 Quad Core Processor (2.66GHz, 4x256kB, 4.8GT/s QPI, LGA 1336 Socket B)
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Quad Core Processor (3.4GHz, 6MB L3 Cache, 4x512KB L2 Cache, 2000 MHz Bus, Socket AM3)
Intel Core i5 750 Qaud Core Processor (2.66GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, 2.5 GT/s Bus, Socket H LGA1156)
Asus P7P55D Motherboard (Intel Socket H LGA1156, P55 Express, ATX, 16GB DDR3)
Asus M4A785TD-V EVO AMD 785G/SB710 Socket AM3 ATX Motherboard
