Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi has recently engaged in a war with folks from Microsoft regarding the next generation consoles. Both camps have been slinging mud and insults at their competition in an effort to boost interest in their own product. This type of behaviour is to be expected. What I never expected to see was this kind of statement
[quote]Kutaragi stated earlier that although the Cell microprocessor comes with eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs) for multicore processing, the chip only uses seven of them. Kutaragi explained that ignoring one SPE as a redundancy will improve the chip’s production yield and allow costs to drop dramatically. In other words, Sony can ship a Cell chip with one defective SPE (out of its eight) as a working product, since the chip only uses seven SPEs to begin with.[/quote]
Is it really smart to admit that you were having trouble churning out quality chips so you have to justify shipping defective CPUs by saying the system doesn’t make use of the 8th SPE to begin with?? Hello…. anybody out there? Does this not shed a truly negative light on the product or is it just me?
At any rate, expect the mudslinging and statements from Mr. Kutaragi to get funnier and funnier.
Source: [url=http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/20/news_6127799.html]Gamespot[/url]
