Nah. They are killing it because of amazing exclusives. That's all.
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Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
141–150 of 284 posts
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a interview of Elon Musk with MKBHD. He was precisely referring to this as being one of the issues when they were trying to automate the pipeline. The machines just couldn't plug a loose tube in its place. Maybe they should have consulted with Sony.
I think what Elon learnt from that experience is that manufacturing things is hard, and that building that knowhow and ability to both build and troubleshoot robot factories like this one is not something you do overnight, even if you hire the best engineers. Basically it’s unlike software and that might be where he stumbled.
Andy Grove used to talk about this a lot - that manufacturing know-how does not come easily, and that continuous improvement and innovation in manufacturing depends on continuing to actually do it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warni...
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does "lights out" mean here? Is it a way to describe a nearly fully-automated production line? If that's the case, then aren't they using it for Model 3/Y already? If yes, then I have to disagree with you, because neither of those cars look anything like Cybertruck, even stylistically. EDIT: thanks for explanation in the replies, it makes sense. If anyone has any additional insight as to how it affects productio…
It's called lights out cause the machines don't need lights, so why pay for them?
Is that true for computer vision based robots? Or do they use lidar or something?
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it's almost more surprising that with that high degree of automation they are not splitting the factory up into smaller ones and building them per-continent.
I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff. Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive. Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one cont…
Thanks for the response! A lot of interesting points I hadn't considered!
For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope.
For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#145Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.
> I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit.
Seven years production run (or more), that should explain a lot. Even if hardware revisions changed significantly in that time (I wouldn't know) that's still a completely different calculation than something that changes annually, or even twice a year, as Sony's own Xperia phones used to.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#146Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.
Every discussion of highly-automated factories brings to mind this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg
Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#147Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.
I had invested in a semiconductor factory early last decade, and it had started making bitcoin miners, it had reminding me of Zion from the Matrix because it seemed like the first time that a machine could make another machine which could immediately start earning a negotiable asset and then transacting for resources. Very surreal to think about.
There was this little game I played on Linux years ago where you played an AI trying to reach singularity status while evading detection by humans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity
Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#148"The 31.4-meter line, completed in 2018, has the ability to churn out a new console every 30 seconds." That seems.... slow? I mean, I have no idea what I expected, but 2 a minute, is that really fast for this type of manufacturing? How does that compare to Xbox or maybe iPhone output? I'm sure 2 a minute is really impressive, but I started reading that thinking something like hundreds or thousands an hour, I guess I…
Controls engineer here - no, that's pretty normal. I'm accustomed to automotive work, but I believe the electronics assembly lines are similar. The flexible materials handling stuff (connecting flat flex cables? Applying Kapton tape?) is indeed super impressive, but the timing is ordinary. A sizeable 6-axis robot like those used here has a minimum cycle time of a second or two for the simplest possible "move in, plac…
>The line is bottlenecked by the slowest process.
I visited the BMW factory in Munich back in 2015; at the time it was manufacturing mostly the 3-series models (not sure now).
It was a generally fascinating experience; the most interesting piece of trivia was that, when scheduling the build order, they try very hard to avoid putting station wagons ('Touring' model) back-to-back.
This was because the build-time of the rear-window assembly on the station wagon took significantly longer than other models due to the rear wiper, and that you would get a literal pipeline stall if you had to do too many together.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to. The appeal of consoles to many in the industry is that it was locked down and you could ringfence your revenue but that's not to say you couldn't address these issues with modern commonly available technologies like digital signing and cryptography. Basically like…
> C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to. How is this state much different from installing Steam on a PC with a couple controllers and sticking it in your living room, besides the C64 being extremely cheap and (as far as I know) not as customizable?
Cheap and providing a long lived homogenous platform. Apple do this to a certain extent but not at the price point. You can customise with peripherals.
Re: Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
#150I've always wondered if you could automate a sort of standard assembly system with a certain amount of adjustments within some parameters (device dimensions, how things are connected)... and pump out any number of different electronics all on the same assembly line / factory using the same robots? Granted that probably already is a thing, or isn't for good reason.
If you give up maximum throughput for flexibility, it's indeed possible to do just that, and AFAIK that's how many factories are operated. There's also a mix and match where you have "subunits" that operate specific subsection of assembly line in specialized manner and provide general resources to multiple further areas (if you play Factorio, such subunits can be directly compared with Assemblers or Assemblers blocks in bigger production lines). An example of such a block cane be manufacture of pipes or PCBs.