A joint statement was made by Sony, Toshiba and IBM without referring to the new Playstation model. Only unnamed sources in the companies have said that it is for the PS3. However, others suggest the chip is for a fourth generation Playstation. The Electronics Times suggests the chip “is likely to take over from the chip previewed at the last ISSCC which is intended to drive Playstation 3.
The three companies say they will invest more than $400 million in the next five years to design the Cell, described as a "supercomputer-on-a-chip," at a development centre within an IBM facility in Austin, Texas. It will then be mass produced at an IBM facility in New York which is being constructed at a cost of $3 billion.
The companies say the result will be consumer devices that are more powerful than IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer, that operate at low power and that access the broadband internet at ultra high speeds.
Each company said only that it will manufacture the product for “a variety of consumer applications.”
Toshiba had designed and built the Playstation 2 processors. For the new chip, Toshiba is contributing to the $400 million investment and its engineers will assist at the IBM facility in Austin.