Kotaku
The 10-20% yield comment from an IBM engineer has brought forth a lot of speculation about the number of consoles Sony is going to be able to produce for launch. They claimed they would have a million available world-wide; estimates say they need around 8 million to satisfy demand. Cell yields might make the derth even greater.
But the crappy Cell yield put Sony in trouble in another way. As the Guardian Technology Blog points out:
The problem is that the cost of a chip depends on the yield. Chips are made on wafers, and you have to process a whole wafer at a time. Let's assume it costs $1,000 produce a wafer with 100 chips on it. If there are no defects at all, that's 100 good chips at $10 each. If the defect rate is 99%, you only get one chip per wafer and it costs $1,000.
So if twenty percent of the chips are good by the above logic, that means Sony's paying five times as much for a single chip as they should. Ugh, Sony. What are you guys doing?
0 - 20% yields for Cell processors lead to problems for Sony PS3? [Guardian]
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