Kev's Development Toolbox

ITWeek has an article about iSuppli, an electronics industry reasearch company, who recently acquired a new PS3 and took it apart so you don’t have to. The component cost for the $599 60GB PS3 according to iSuppli is around $840, which is going to lead to some serious losses for Sony until they can get their manufacturing costs down. Of course over time they will be able to recoup this cost through games sales, but it’s still rather eye opening that you are buying a piece of hardware $200 below the cost of the parts inside the box.

Andrew Rassweiler, a services manager and senior analyst at iSuppli described the PS3 as ‘an engineering masterpiece’, offering ‘the performance of a supercomputer at the price of an entry-level PC’.

The crazy thing about the insane eBay sales going on right now with people selling their PS3s is that there are so many PS3s listed (around 21,000?), that at some point once the initial frantic bidding dies down there may actually be some bargains to be had. There are plenty of listings currently with no reserves and no bids – it might just be possible that you can pick one up in the next few days for very close to the original paid price.

Who knows, wouldn’t it be ironic if some of these people who capitalized on the hype and demand and only bought one to resell actually ended up taking a loss? Now wouldn’t that be funny.

The new PS3 will provide backwards compatibility with the PS2 and PSOne by including the PS2’s main processors inside the PS3’s box. Even then some known incompatibilities have already been found. These will likely be ironed out in forthcoming Firmware upgrades.

Sony took this same approach with the PS2 to provide backwards compatibility with the PSOne, by taking the CPU of the original PSOne and using it as the I/O controller inside the PS2. Not only would this processor control all the I/O operations in the machine, but PSOne games could be run directly on this chip to provide backwards compatibility.