IBM today announced that the company is now producing a 65 nm version of the Cell Broadband Engine in East Fishkill, New York. The Cell Broadband Engine, of course, powers Sony’s PlayStation 3, and the move to 65 nm promises to help Sony reduce the cost of their expensive console further. Sony has proven to be aggressive in attempting to increase profitability for the PlayStation 3, removing the expensive Emotion Engine chip in Europe at the expense of near-universal compatibility for Playstation 2 games. A 65 nm version of the Xbox 360 processor has been rumored for a while, with the alleged Zephyr revision of the console boasting the new CPU. While this announcement by IBM is a long way from a new CPU integrated in the PS3, this definitely puts Sony on the road to reducing power consumption and component costs for their hardware.

IBM’s full press release continues after the jump.

IBM Announces Production of Cell Chip at 65nm

Armonk, NY - 12 Mar 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that the company has begun producing a new, 65 nanometer (nm) version of the Cell Broadband Engine at IBM’s state-of-the-art East Fishkill, New York microchip production facility.
The revolutionary Cell chip, jointly developed by IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba, is effectively a supercomputer-on-a-chip, providing breakthrough performance for consumer electronics, medical imaging, design engineering and other graphics-intensive applications. In addition to serving as the digital heartbeat of Sony Computer Entertainment’s PLAYSTATION®3, the chip also appears in IBM’s BladeCenter servers.
A team of computer scientists from IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba has collaborated on the development of the Cell microprocessor at a joint design center established in Austin, Texas, since March 2001.

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