Sony PlayStation 4 Enters Mass Production, Has Phenomenal Production Yield

From X-bit Labs: When Sony Corp. launched its PlayStation 3 game console seven years ago, the firm face a number of problems, one of which was high price of the system and another one was poor yield of Cell processor, the heart of the PS3. With PlayStation 4 the company made a lot of decisions differently and now it hopes that the same issues that harmed success of the PS3 will not hurt the PS4.

"It is everything we can manufacture. We want to make sure that consumers have an opportunity to buy one on November 15 and through the holidays, so we are holding back some inventory to make sure that people have an opportunity to buy one that come in on launch day. But we can pre-sell every unit we can manufacture, and the good news is production yields have been phenomenal. So this will be by a magnitude of a lot the biggest launch we have ever had," said Jack Tretton, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, in an interview with Fox Business, reports Games Industry web-site.

When Sony developed PlayStation 4, it took a completely different design approach than it took with the PlayStation 3. Instead of using proprietary microprocessor designed in-house, the company decided to adopt industry-standard AMD x86 central processing unit. Sony also decided to utilize industry-standard GDDR5 memory instead of XDR DRAM and installed an industry-standard AMD Radeon graphics engine. As a result, it is not only easy do develop games for PlayStation 3, but it is much easier to manufacture it.

Back in August, Sony Computer Entertainment announced that it had received as many as one million pre-orders on PlayStation 4 game console.

While pre-orders naturally reflect huge interest towards the PS4 system, there will certainly be loads of people looking forward to buy their units in retail. Earlier this year financial analysts estimated that 2.5 million PlayStation 4 units and 2.3 million Xbox One units are to be shipped in Q4 2013. In case the numbers turn to be true, then the launch of next-gen consoles will be triumphal as never before in history of gaming sales have been so high.

Still, record sales at launch do not necessarily guarantee long-term success as early adopters are usually so-called core gamers, who may own more than one console and buy loads of games. Amateur and casual gamers may delay their purchases until systems get more affordable, or even skip consoles as other devices are gaining their gaming capabilities.

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