[New PS3 Teardown (8)] Overview of Main Board

Sept 15, 2009 13:53 Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad

Continued from [New PS3 Teardown (7)] Blu-ray Disc Device Gets Smaller

Finally, we took out the main board. Sandwiched by two metal plates, it looked like a Japanese sweet called "monaka," a bean-jam-filled wafer.

The upper metal plate is pierced with holes of various sizes. Especially, the portions located above the Cell microprocessor and the RSX graphics processor are largely cut out. Power consumption tends to be large at those parts, so they have to be efficiently cooled by the heatsink.

When we removed the two metal plates, the Cell and RSX drew our attention. Sony employed the 45nm Cell processor for the latest PS3 instead of the 65nm Cell, which is equipped in the former PS3 models. We believe that the company could develop the slimmer, smaller and lower power consumption PS3 due to the employment of the 45nm Cell.

According to its catalog, the power consumption of the latest PS3 is about 250W, 30W lower than that of the former models.

The heat spreader of the RSX could be easily removed, but that of the Cell could not. Actually, we almost gave it up.

When examining the area surrounding the Cell, we noticed that there was no Proadlizer, a four-terminal decoupling capacitor developed by NEC Tokin Corp. The former PS3 models are equipped with a total of four Proadlizers on the top and bottom surfaces of the main board for the Cell.

For the new PS3, Sony instead used a conductive polymer aluminum capacitor, a laminated ceramic capacitor and so forth.

Near the plug connected to the power supply module, a wireless module is embedded. When a metal plate was removed from the module, there was a chip printed with "MARVELL." It seemingly supports both wireless LAN and Bluetooth with one chip.

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