According to Asahi Shinbun, Sony will be selling their semiconductor production facilities, including those for the production of their Cell processor, to Toshiba for approximately 100 billion yen (~870 million dollars). The sale is expected to happen next spring. There is speculation that Sony does not foresee new applications for their Cell processor and is seeking to reclaim a large amount of their investment capital.
Sony's semiconductor subsidiary, Sony Semiconductor, is selling the LSI (Large Scale Integration) facilities in their Nagasaki Technology Center on the island of Kyushu. Besides being the production facilities for the Cell processor, the plant also makes image processing chips for game devices.
Sony will continue to develop the Cell processor, but they are reconsidering producing the chips themselves. Instead, the will be putting their effort into next generation audio/video devices. In particularly, they intend to put emphasis on the production of CMOS sensors like those used to record images in digital cameras.
1 comment:
Just yesterday, I predicted the end of the cell processor because it's just too dang hard to code for. I was predicting that instead of 9 "synergistic chips", we're more likely to see 9 *real* CPUs. Maybe I don't know what the heck I'm talking about, but I really don't see developers spending a lot of time coding for highly-optimized, but difficult to code for chips.
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