A bit of surprising piece of news appeared today on the internet - the format war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray is officially over and one shop after another gets rid of everything with HD DVD logo on it. One would expect Sony and other companies promoting Blu-Ray format to strengthen their position, but exact opposite happened: Sony Corp said on Wednesday it will sell its microchip production facilities in western Japan to Toshiba Corp for 90 billion yen ($835 million), in their latest move to focus on their core businesses. The equipment will be used by their semiconductor joint venture that will make high-performance Cell chips and RSX graphic chips, both used in Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console, as well as other microchips that go into Toshiba products.
The venture will be established on April 1. Sony, which is focusing on image sensor chips for digital cameras and pulling away from heavy investments for cutting-edge chip production equipment, said in October it would sell production facilities for making key microchips used in the PS3 to Toshiba, but the price has been unavailable. It’s also well known that Sony had to pay a lot more money (estimates ranged around $300 / unit) for every PS3 console with Blu-Ray drive, which turned out to be one of the reasons why this format won in the final battle with more than 8 million owners in contrary with only 1.4 million sold HD DVD drives.
