Sony Corp said on Monday it will spend $1.1 billion in the business year from April to build cutting-edge production lines for microchips to power a new generation of gadgets and establish it as the Intel Corp of the consumer electronics world. The bulk of Sony’s latest investment for the coming business year will go towards top-notch production lines for a high-powered microprocessor code-named ‘Cell’ that it is developing with Toshiba Corp and IBM. Analysts expect the chip to power Sony’s next-generation game console, but the company aims to make ‘Cell’ the global standard for consumer electronics in the high-speed Internet era. Some industry analysts have said ‘Cell’ could become the ‘Pentium’ of the consumer electronics world. Sony said it would spend 53 billion yen to upgrade its Isahaya plant, Nagasaki, in southwest Japan, 36 billion yen on the East Fishkill plant run by IBM in New York, and 31 billion yen on Toshiba’s factory in Oita.
