Hrm ... mistake?

[Greg Beetham]

You could very well be right PT, I waded through as much old Sony press releases and technobabbel as I could stand in an effort too uncover the original one that I dimly rember, the only reference to the microprocessor development I could consistantly unearth was in relation to the LSI tecnology (Large Scale Intergration, also used in the processors in the KM7D-5D) with Sony in collaboration variously with IBM, NEC and Toshiba too develop this line further, presumably for the "Bionz" processor, although that wasn't confirmed. I'm fairly sure Toshiba has a fab for processors and IBM certainly does (many), there was plenty of info connected with the development of the "cell" processor for their playstation3 (apparently using IBM and Toshiba resources), but no reference to any admitted collaboration with intel, that I could find (from a Sony perspective).
Greg
btw Just for interest sake here is an example of the complexity and cost of producing a new model processor.

Quote from Wikipedia
Developing new, high-end CPUs is a very costly proposition. Both the logical complexity (needing very large logic design and logic verification teams and simulation farms with perhaps thousands of computers) and the high operating frequencies (needing large circuit design teams and access to the state-of-the-art fabrication process) account for the high cost of design for this type of chip. The design cost of a high-end CPU will be on the order of US $100 million. Since the design of such high-end chips nominally takes about five years to complete, to stay competitive a company has to fund at least two of these large design teams to release products at the rate of 2.5 years per product generation.

As an example, the typical loaded cost for one computer engineer is often quoted to be $250,000 US dollars/year. This includes salary, benefits, CAD tools, computers, office space rent, etc. Assuming that 100 engineers are needed to design a CPU and the project takes 4 years.

Total cost = $250,000/engineer-man_year X 100 engineers X 4 years = $100,000,000 US dollars.

The above amount is just an example. The design teams for modern day general purpose CPUs have several hundred team members.

Only the personal computer mass market (with production rates in the hundreds of millions, producing billions of dollars in revenue) can support such a large design and implementation teams.[citation needed] As of 2004, only four companies are actively designing and fabricating state of the art general purpose computing CPU chips: Intel, AMD, IBM and Fujitsu.[citation needed] Motorola has spun off its semiconductor division as Freescale as that division was dragging down profit margins for the rest of the company. Texas Instruments, TSMC and Toshiba are a few examples of a companies doing manufacturing for another company's CPU chip design.