Sony Open to Considering PS3 Price Cuts 339
njkid1 writes with word that Sony is considering dropping the PS3's price. The Mercury news reports that Sony Senior Vice President Takao Yuhara has admitted they are investigating whether to drop the PlayStation 3 in price around the world, despite statements previously made that the 'lower' PS3 price in Japan is hurting Sony's bottom line. Profits for the company slipped some five percent in the October-December period, and the shortfall expected through March could be even worse than previously predicted. The article points out the possibly risky nature of a price cut for such an expensive item so early in its lifespan, and notes the stiff competition from the Xbox 360 and the Wii.
A better way to make money (Score:2)
That's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That's nice... (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of some of the (orginal) xbox demo units that were sealed in so tight they got to hot and crashed:P
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Yeah, according to slashdot quoting some guy on his blog quoting an unnamed Sony rep. No, they overheated. In Sony's defense, those enclosures are pretty poorly ventilated.
But really, the demo game is unimpressive
Re:That's nice... (Score:4, Funny)
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Not that it's really a "high-end computer" with merely 256MB of RAM which cannot be upgraded, but I digress.
Sony is Going to Lose the Console War (Score:5, Insightful)
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Too late.
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I'm not. I'm living in the USA.
Boy, do you look like an idiot now? (Free hint: The answer is "YES")
Not that I really agree with your analysis of the UK, but things are going to get worse in the entire first world before they get better. China and India are both up-and-coming and between them have enough population to throw everyone's system out of wh
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I think it all depends on how deep their pockets are, and how badly they want to win. If they were to do a serious price cut (as in 50%, bring it down to the $300 range), they would be hurting, and hurting BAD, however the units *would* start to sell. Market penetration is nearly as important as profit per unit sold. The main thing killing them right now is that Nintendo actually turns a profit on every Wii sold, Microsoft, I don't recall whether it's a loss-leader or not, but Microsoft'
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I'd like to know the sort of royalties they will make on both games and Blu-Ray technology. If it's high enoug
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone else betting that Sony learns nothing from this?
They seriously need to figure out that, when someone buys a game system, we want to PLAY GAMES ON IT. We don't need to watch movies, listen to MP3s, view images, surf the web, do our dishes, and drive to work using the same machine.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
And then consumers whined. "They cost too much"
and then Sony said, "But you told us you wanted those features when we asked you about them so we put them in there. You had to know that would raise the price."
Consumers: "Waaaah it costs too much we just want to play puzzle games and casual games"
Sony: "But you said you wanted games that were more like those you played at home on your portables. You wanted 3D games rather than stripped down 2D travesties of 3D games like what happened on the Gameboy Color ports of 3D games.
You said you wanted higher resolutions on your home machines like you have on PC's. You wanted built in wireless so you wouldn't have to buy a wireless bridge, you wanted us to use standard memory cards. and now you complain about having to buy an HDTV, having to pay for the built in wireless, and having to pay for an adapter for the old cards? You people are hypocrites and don't know what you want."
Here's what Sony needs to learn:
Consumers don't know what they want, will whine anyway when they get what they said they wanted, and sometimes lie
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
And then consumers whined. "They cost too much"
and then Sony said, "But you told us you wanted those features when we asked you about them so we put them in there. You had to know that would raise the price."
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The big worry with Sony isn't that people wait longer to buy PS3s, its that people look at the PS3 and buy an XBox 360 because the PS3 costs too much and has a lot of features that people aren't going to use.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sony also needs to quit trying to use its consoles to push their other technologies. The main reason for the PS3's expense is that its pushing the Blu-Ray drive technology. In essence, the PS3 is subsidizing Sony's Blu-Ray technology.
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Sony doesn't control WB, Paramount, Disney, Fox (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. In titles without the image constraint token, the resolution far exceeds that of DVD-Video in both luma and chroma. Even with the image constraint token, the chroma resolution is double that of DVD-Video in each dimension. The major American movie studios that have adopted Blu-ray Disc have agreed not to use the image constraint token for the first few years of releases. But whether Warner Bros., Paramount, Disney, and Fox use the image constraint token in future Blu-ray Disc titles is not Sony's to control.
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We want homebrew to run, not be blocked. (Score:2)
We also want to play games on it. This means that games from smaller developers need to run, not error out with "Cannot load game because it is not signed." That's part of why PLAYSTATION 3 has Linux, so that innovative 2D games from smaller developers can run.
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They seriously need to figure out that, when someone buys a game system, we want to PLAY GAMES ON IT. We don't need to watch movies, listen to MP3s, view images, surf the web, do our dishes, and drive to work using the same machine.
And why would they? This is a lesson the cell phone industry still hasn't learned. And they have more at stake. Sony will claim that they deliver what the consumer wants to their grave, all the while loading up simple tech
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Says you. I mean, aside from the dishes and the driving to work, I want all that in one box. This is in fact why I bought an Xbox. If I couldn't have put a media player on there, I wouldn't have bought it. I held off on buying one, in fact, until they were easily moddable and
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But then, the Wii costs less than half as much as the ps3. Hummm.
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Clarification. Wii CAN play movies, not DVDs. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes it can play movies. It cannot play DVD's , but it can play motion Jpeg (a Quicktime format) which I have used (My Nikon CoolPix records in that format) in the Photo Channel.
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Can't really fault Sony on that. The Xbox 360 does four of those and the Wii does three of them.
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I haven't figured out how to surf the web on my 360, so I can only assume that I'm woefully underestimating either its ability to do my dishes or drive me to work. It doesn't look very comfortable to sit on, so I guess I'm leaning towards it being able to do my dishes. On the othe
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Drop the price?! (Score:2, Funny)
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I'm not even going to think about buying a PS3 until there's a proper Gran Turismo game out, and the console is below 300 UKP.
PS 3 sales prediction cut by 25% (Score:5, Informative)
They originally planned 6 mil, adjusted to 4.5 mil now. more... [vgcharts.org]
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While these numbers indicate that the PS3's sales are below expectation, there is another interesting interpretation. Microsoft had sold 10 million Xbox 360's by the end of 2006. If Sony genuinely sells 4.5 million by end of March, they will have almost half the user base of the 360. Given all the doomcasting we've been hearing, that is not actually that bad a place to be after only three months in the market.
(And yes, yes, Microsoft is also selling 360's during the same period, but while sales may have b
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Sony changes PS3 sales target to 3 times the number of Xbox 360s sold over the same period.
Enough! (Score:5, Insightful)
That is at least until the (unlikely) event that the non-fanboi consumer starts getting interested in Sony's nexgen child.
better to lose a little on the sale (Score:5, Informative)
of course since you can still buy PS2s many might opt that route if they don't like WII or XBOX360
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I know where you're coming from but I don't think there will be a significant drop in the 360 price anytime soon (anything over $50). The problem is that the graphics card is much more complicated than entire consoles of previous generations. So you are effectively paying for the complexity of two previous generations for a 360 or PS3.
I bought a 360 over the holidays and my roommate finally managed to get a Wii a couple of weeks ago. While the Wii is certainly fun and I would buy it myself even though I h
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It's not 30+ games (I realize you said "or whatever" just think it needs clarification), it's a number of licensed products that yields the same profit as 30+ games. Over the next 10 years this is easy. I am a relative casual gamer and I have well over 30 licensed products that I purchased solely based on my PS2 purchase. For the PS 3 this will be retail and downloaded games, Blu-Ray disks,
20GB Model (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:20GB Model (Score:4, Insightful)
Millionares think 900,000 dollars for a home is a great deal, whereas mr. and mrs. joe shmo can think 500 bucks a month for a one room apartment is a great deal.
Unless you have a burning desire to have blu-ray in your home, there really is no good reason beyond a personal opinion to spend 600 dollars on a PS3. the 360 has the same graphics (in some cases, better) and still uses "old" dual-layer dvd technology.
Had sony stayed out of the media market (which they have failed in time after time after time) and just stuck with what works, they would be in a much better position.
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I'll argue with the capacity of the DVD versus the capacity of the blu-ray. I think it's better to have that extra room (it's like a factor of 10 or 20 larger). Hideo Kojima said in an interview [gamepro.com] linked on Slashdot that he thought games would eventually get to 50GB. The interviewer even says that Resistance was 16GB, much larger than any DVD can hold [wikipedia.org]. Personally, I prefer the one disc to multi-disc games.
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The developers had the space, so they filled it up. This could mean they filled it up with super huge textures in the menus, sound files that are way far beyond in quality what the human ear has the ability to distinguish (not to mention most people not having the setu
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You're right...I guess we should just go back to 16 bit textures...even better, let's eliminate 3D worlds while we're at it because the models take up way too much room...and any stretch of animation at that point....and forget music soundtracks because they really aren't necessary, I'll just get out my MIDI keyboard...finally, I'm pretty sure we can just eliminat
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I'm not saying games should not progress. What I am saying is their size should not be artificially increased.
If the same quality graphics, sound, and LENGTH of game are coming out on dvd9 as on blu-ray...well, you can finish the sentence.
Re: PS3 worth about $300. (Score:2)
Exactly. I put the PS3's worth at around $300 USD. That's the going rate of a first Gen HD-DVD player, which is what the PS3 is (a first gen Blu-Ray player). If they charge $300 and throw in a movie worth watching in HD (Taladega Nights doesn't count. I mean a movie that is sold on it's visual appeal) they might have another sale.
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Dude, I didn't say the PS3 sucked. I didn't say it wasn't a good game machine. I said that unless you fit one of the three scenarios in my comment, the PS3 is a shit value for you.
People who want to play PS3 exclusives are one of those groups. So are people who want a Blu-Ray player. So you are complainin
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I'm not buying an Xbox 360 either. I may buy a Wii a ways down the road. Not sure yet. Oddly enough most of the games I play are either on the Super Nintendo, or an original Playstation game in my PS2 (which I bought before I realized Sony was evil.)
Uh, what? You came stra
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I am prepared to back up my assertions with facts any time you would like.
Yes they are, which is why no I don't. Actually I think Microsoft is more evil.
Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Now they have to drop prices and quickly.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another stupid move on Sony's part. They were better off continuing to deny that a price drop was even being discussed, and then picking a random day and just lowering the price.
I certainly wouldn't buy a $600 console knowing that the price could be $500 in a month or two.
That's a free second controller and a game....
Which is the other way they could go, I guess... Bundle a second sixaxis and resistance:fall of man with every 60GB unit for the same price.
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"Bundle a second sixaxis and resistance:fall of man with every 60GB unit for the same price."
But I thought they could sell 5 million without any games?
Not selling hurts more (Score:3, Insightful)
the 'lower' PS3 price in Japan is hurting Sony's bottom line
NOT selling a PS3 hurts the bottom line even more.
Re:Not selling hurts more (Score:5, Interesting)
While the long-term view says that they need to sell as many PS3s as possible before the 360 runs away with the game, there is a need to see production costs come down to prevent very substantial financial loss.
Personally, I think that Sony is in serious trouble this year. There are so many very highly anticipated titles coming for the 360 that will almost certainly be system sellers (Halo 3 being the ultimate), and so few coming this year for the PS3. If it takes another year for a system-selling title to come out on PS3, Sony might not even be able to get close to the market share of the 360.
(I don't consider the Wii to be a direct competitor, as it will almost certainly be the #1 selling system by the end of the year. However, for many people it will be a second system. For blockbuster games, the 360 and PS3 are the competitors.)
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I've also heard the 30 titles thing floating about. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but there is something else to consider as well: mindshare. Even if sony never makes back the
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WTF? How does that make any sence? Not selling them hurts more as it is a TOTAL loss rather than a PARTIAL loss. Keep in mind the reason they sell it at a loss to begin with is to encourage adoption, as it is a gateway to their other products and services. The PS3 is not the product. The product is everything else that goes with it (games, movies, controllers, cables, etc...) and they hav
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Right now, somewhere in Sony of America an executive is talking to a third party publisher and is trying to respond to the threat "If the PS3 doesn't start to sell more software we won't release any exclusive games for it!"
As dumb as Sony is they still know that EA, Activisio
Bitterness (Score:5, Interesting)
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Where are they? (Score:3)
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NorthEast PA has plenty. I can go into several EB / Gamestops, Targets, Wal-marts... you name it they have it, at least a few of each model. They've been in stock and readily available since the week before Christmas.
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Ever since about 2-3 weeks after launch they've been available everywhere around here. Want me to mail you one?
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they aren't Coke (Score:5, Insightful)
Take Coke. We were told by the company that their newest was the greatest shit on earth and all other colas might as well pack it in. They even took away Coke. The Coke we all knew and loved. A Coke that all they had to do was not fuck it up.
And they fucked it up.
And there was outrage. More importantly, there were no sales of this New Coke. Yet people as I recall were selling two liters of old, or Classic Coke for hundreds of dollars.
And they saw this outrage and maybe cared, maybe not. But they saw the sales in those markets. And their New Coke had a short, painful life, and a quiet death. I don't even know if they promoted when the sliver stripe on the cans disappeared and Classic Coke was just Coke again.
Because they could. Because THEIR product does not have to evolve and is unique within their domain. They were smart enough, God help me, to realize that they had a great product in their domain, and their customers were willing to fight for it; all they had to do is not fuck it up.
THEY could say they fucked up, go back to the Classic taste we all loved, and sure, even drop the price if they wanted to to sweeten the deal a little, slight pun intended. And we would forgive them because they made us whole, we had our Coke again and the world was right.
Their product allowed for a fuck up of such massive proportions. A gig in management there must be sweet.
Sony assumes that the BRANDNAME "Playstation" carries all the attributes of a Classic Coke. No. Their product does have to evolve and becomes less and less unique by the day. They cannot just apologize, with their tails between their legs go back to what they had, drop the price a little, and make us all whole and happy with their product again.
Sony must make their "New Coke" fly.....and now they must try to repair the injury to their fans and make them whole again. A price drop alone cannot accomplish this, I wonder if anything they do really can. I wish them luck but I'm betting this will be another how not to succeed example in business classes across the globe in a few years.
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Mod parent up. And read this :) (Score:2, Flamebait)
Coke did not go from Coke to New Coke and then go "oh noes, we are losing all the profits" and change back to Coke Classic for the consumer - that's exactly what they wanted to happen, to have people think - to think they had "won" and got old Coke back. Coke won, and they didn't get old Coke back.
The change in formula the parent refers to is a simple one - replacing sugar with corn syrup. A sligh
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The change you are talking about is the switch from real sugar to high fructose corn syrup, and it happened almost a year before the introduction of New Coke. It was pretty uneventful, since there were no blogs back then. A few people complained, but they were ignored.
Re:they aren't Coke (Score:4, Informative)
No, but seriously, there were far less crafty and conspiratorial reasons behind New Coke.
It started with the invention of NutraSweet. Diet Coke pushed Tab and all other sugar-free colas into total obscurity. It not only became the #1 diet soda, it became the #3 soda overall.
The crucial difference between the flavors of Coke and Pepsi is the choice of citrus used. Coke has always used lemon, while Pepsi uses lime. That's why Coke has that "snap" that hard-core Coke fans crave, while Pepsi tastes slightly sweeter (which led to them winning all those "Pepsi Challenge" taste tests... If you just have a sip of each back-to-back, the sweeter one will taste "better.")
Diet Coke has a formula which is extremely sweet, like Pepsi.
Younger people tend to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi, while older folks like Coke... generally speaking.
This created a demographic scare for Coke execs in the 1980s. They saw that a whole generation was growing up on Pepsi, and feared for their market-share dominance. Not considering that some of these Pepsi-drinking kids might gradually change their preference, they panicked.
New Coke was an effort to capture the younger market, by making a sugar-based cola which tasted pretty much the same as the startlingly popular Diet Coke, and compete with Pepsi on the basis of sweetness.
The problem was, people who drink Coke exclusively don't like the ultra-sweet taste of Pepsi.
If it was an on-purpose maneuver, it was a terribly risky one. The ONLY reason their old customers came back for "Classic" Coke was because there was, and is, nobody making anything that tastes quite like Coca-Cola. (Actually, there may have been, since the patent on Coke's old formula has long since run out, but nobody is calling their attention to it.)
As for why Classic doesn't *quite* taste the same to picky cola drinkers: Coke keeps most of the formula the same, but uses whatever sweetner is cheapest at the time for the region which is making it, which in almost all cases is either high fructose corn syrup or beet sugar. They figure most people won't care, and they are mostly right.
If you are one of those hard-core Coke fans and miss "the real thing", go shopping in April.
For the Passover, Coke makes a limited batch of Kosher Coke, so kids from traditional Jewish families can have a little Coke with their feast. The thing is, there is only one Coke formula which has been approved as Kosher, and that's the original formula using cane sugar for sweetener.
You can identify the Kosher cans of Coke by looking for the triangle-shaped seal of the Rabbinical Council near the base of the can. I don't drink Coke anymore (all that sugar is bad for you), but back in the day I used to buy it by the crate-load out of local supermarkets and hoard enough to get me through as much of the year as I could.
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So, it's not really "kosher" coke that's the issue - it's that "chametz-free" coke is what's needed at Passover.
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I was under the impression they never patented it, so the formula isn't public; they've always protected it as a trade secret.
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Then I wonder if you were alive back then. They promoted it to death. That 90% of people who recall this story refer to the old Coke as either Coke Classic or Classic Coke is proof of how large-scale that advertising was. They didn't just take away the silver stripe. They continued to sell reformulated Coke under the moniker "New Coke" (still with silver stripe) and then sold the old
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When Coke was released, they stopped the old formula for a short period of time (I want to say 3-6 months). There was "old coke" speculation going on.
After it was clear that it wasn't catching on like they'd hoped, they released the previous formula under "Coke Classic" and the newer formula under "New Coke". Gradually, they make "New Coke" go away (I want to say 18-24 months).
No doubt, after all the current execs are dead, the new CEO of coke will announce "New Coke" and the cycle will repeat itsel
$299 for 20GB.... (Score:2)
Sony has to find a way... (Score:2)
Unfortunate wording (Score:5, Funny)
Someone mentioned a huge throbbing joke in there somewhere, but I'm boned if I can find it.
Perhaps 65nm Cell is a factor (Score:2)
They've set themselves up for it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Devs are comfortable on their competitors' machines - The Wii is just a faster gamecube (literally) with a neat controller, and while the 360 is relatively complex they've got wonderful top-notch tools to support development and an architecture thats doesn't have a split memory model or hobbled assymetric CPU.
Despite the high price, they're loosing about $175 - $225 per unit (depending on the model) while their competotors' machines are already profitable hardware. Nintendo has never sold an unprofitable machine, and right now, Microsoft could give consumers a $50 price drop and take each new owner out to lunch before they would go back into the red.
Mark my words -- If the earth doesn't shake for Sony real soon they'll be a distant third this time around, and may be foreced to drop from the race early or even for good, and if Sony's game division fails its going to make a huge hit on the entire company's bottom line.
They're arrogant over an overpriced architecture that hurts more than it helps, all in the name of pushing their BluRay format.
No one gets it yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like GM is to the US, Sony is the poster child of Japan's industrial growth -- and in ten years
they will be in a desperate struggle for survival.
Think that's too grim?
Watch.
The tried too hard with this one. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just give me a game machine that plays games and doesn't rival my car in sticker price.
Sony Just RAISED the Price of the PS3 in Canada (Score:2, Informative)
PS3 Price Drop = Xbox 360 Price Drop (Score:4, Informative)
I will never buy another Sony product... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sheep we are apparently.
an offset troll for your amusment (Score:3, Funny)
then I got another one, and it broke the TV, make the cat crazy and insulted my parakeet.
and it doesn't even have blue-ray
Let's make a deal Sony (Score:3, Funny)
-Eric
Bad, yet, not so bad (Score:2)
Exclusivity does have a price tag on it.
Re:I spent $647.99 (Score:4, Informative)
The Cell processor uses 7 cores, but each one has 8 physical cores on it.
The reason for this is that they expect a roughly 1 in 8 failure rate of the cores (or close to it). By having 8 cores, many chip yields will have one bad core, but it's okay. They test them, disable the bad core, and ship the chip with the dead portion disabled.
When they happen to have a good chip with all cores good, it'e either used for other applications, or it has a random core disabled anyway and goes into a ps3.
When there's more than one core dead, I'm not sure what they do. I'd guess they either scrap it, or use it in less demanding applications.
It's a somewhat clever model. But it makes me wonder if they're releasing chips with cores that might me marginal into the market.
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