As the Playstation 3 enters its third year in market, Sony still is losing more than $50 on each unit sold.
Research firm iSuppli estimates that every $399 Playstation 3 console costs Sony $448.73 to build.
This loss is a significant improvement over the losses Sony incurred at the PS3 launch. During that time, it was estimated that the company lost $240 on the $599 consoles and $305 on the $499 version.
Moving both Cell processor as well as Nvidia Reality Synthesizer manufacturing to smaller die chip sizes helped reduce the CPU's cost from $89 in 2006 to $46 and the GPU from $129 in 2006 to $58. Thanks to the power savings caused by the smaller chips, Sony also managed to nix $10 off the Playstation 3 power supply unit.
Sony also redesigned the Playstation 3 in order to reduce its production costs. The company managed to cut down the number of internal parts from 4,048 to 2,820 parts, but not without sacrificing the "Emotion Engine" PS2 CPU chip, which was used for backwards compatibility with PS2 games.
