PS3s will be designed to be shipped with defective Cells

[Zeus]

I think it's a great idea to add redundancy in order to cut down costs. We still get the same thing, but that way, they can lessen the "failure" rate. Makes you wonder how much power they're going to lose, though, since one of the SPEs is actually not used.

But one thing that might hurt the PS3 is the Blue Ray format. It's not set in stone that it'll be successful, but the PS3 will only be able to use media based on it. Sure it'll be able to play movies, but if the HD-DVD is used as the base format, they're screwed. I'm sure they can at least do Blue-Ray just for the PS3 even if a unified format is different, but that'll increase their costs even more on a costly system.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/06/20 ... 27799.html

[Imakeholesinu]

HD-DVD??? Shit am I going to have to buy a new fucking DVD player and burner next year?

[SineSwiper]

Interesting. Back in the day (and I'm talking way back), hard drives used to ship with a bad sector chart, so they were already known to be defective, but they did have the right amount of sectors for what they were selling it for. (IOW, the good sectors equaled the amount of MB they were advertising.)

For low-end systems or low-cost items such as consoles, this seems to be a good step.

As far as the HD-ROM system, I certainly hope they aren't pushing to make their stupid UMD discs as a standard replacement for DVDs. The PS3 still needs to play DVDs to be fairly successful, as many people buy the console as a multi-purpose device.