Just to clarify… they aren’t making it with 8 cells so they have an extra for redundancy.. the chip design is supposed to have 8 working cells. However, actually manufacturing a chip with 8 fully functioning cells is pretty tough.. I read in another similar article something about the ratio being something in the ballpark of 10-20% chance that when they make a chip that all eight cells work. Taking that into account the PS3 is designed to only require 7 of those cells to work to be a functional PS3. This means if they crank out a number of chips and of most of them only 7 cells work they can still put it in the PS3 and ship it off. In a nutshell it’s not about redundancy for the consumer, but about allowing for a margin of error in a manufacturing process that’s still relatively new.

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