Sony interview
Posted by @ 7:17 PM, EDT
Gamers.com smacked up a huge interview with the VP of R&D at SCE, Phil Harrison.
Here’s a slice:

Gamers.com (Rik): What about Sony licensing out the PS2 technology? There’s been talk about the embedded market, can you give an example of an embedded product, or the graphics workstation, and are you trying to compete with SGI or Sun workstations?

Phil Harrison: Well, let’s talk about these one at a time because they’re slightly different businesses. PlayStation 2 technology is designed by Sony in conjunction with Toshiba. Sony Computer Entertainment designed the graphics chip, the graphics synthesizer, in conjunction with another lab within Sony. We have invested to date about two and a half billion dollars in our own chip fabrication facilities in Japan, one in Ooita, two in Nagasaki now. These are facilities that are cranking out the chips to put into the machines for the Japanese products, and as you probably know, the Japanese sales are just through the roof. It’s always out of stock. We’re up to about 2.4 million machines sold through now, and you can’t find one anywhere. Soon as we ship some new ones into the market, voom, it goes straight out again, so there’s obviously pent-up demand in the Japanese market. We got the impending launch of the U.S. and the European product, and we’ve announced that we’re doing 10 million PlayStation 2s between now and the end of our fiscal year in March of 2001. That’s a huge amount of production, but what we’ve put in place with this new investment (we’ve recently announced 1.2 billion dollars in investment into new chip plants) is to make sure we have the capacity to chase the demand for PlayStation 2 around the world and all the way up. We think it’s going to be a tremendously successful product and we have great confidence in the success of the product. That introduces the possibility in the future of licensing out the technology and selling chips to be embedded in other devices.