More than ever,the ability to cut down the production cost for wafer and cells while keeping performance up is crucial to preserve ones competitiveness in the PV market.One promising route towards this target is the introduction of diamond wire sawing.Due to different properties of the cutting fluid and of the wafer surface resulting from the new process compared to the slurry-based sawing,down-stream processes such as wafer cleaning and texturing may have to be adapted to ensure best overall performance in terms of productivity and cell efficiency.In this paper we investigate the properties of wafers cut on the RENA RS 690-DW diamond wire saw and give an overview on the parameters important to optimize the complete process sequence from wire-sawing to texturing.The paper will further present cost and performance data for slurry and diamond cut mono and multi wafers and cells.The results confirm that diamond wire sawing can substantially contribute to reduce the production costs and show how a comprehensive approach involving downstream processing helps obtaining best overall performance with the new sawing technology.