Okay that's a bit much but I can already see the misinterpretations that will start flying around.
According to
GameSpot Kutaragi was recently interviewed about the PS3 cell processor:
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.
"This is the ultimate aesthetic. The number of SPEs we equip to the Cell and how many we will actually use are two different things. I wanted to adopt the idea of 'redundancy' to the development of semiconductors. Logic LSIs, excluding memory chips, are considered defective and unshippable if just one transistor or line doesn't work. If the Cell's final chip dimension is about 200 square millimeters, making one without any defects is extremely difficult. We can't reach our anticipated production yield with that. Of course, we'll take various measures to lower the defect density, but that won't be enough. But by considering one or two SPEs as a redundancy from the very beginning, we can still use a Cell chip even if it's partially defective," Kutaragi said, who also revealed that a similar scheme would also be used for the PlayStation 3's RSX graphics processor.
Interesting stuff indeed. Flame on!
