PlayStation 3 Revealed

Sony have revealed the next generation PlayStation. As most of us expected the official name is the PlayStation 3 (PS3) and will be powered by a Cell Processor, which was jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It will also be Backwards compatible with PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games and like the PlayStation it might improve them as the PlayStation 2 did with PlayStation games.

In addition to the Cell processor, it will also utilise a new powerful graphics processor (codenamed RSX) co-developed by NVIDIA Corporation and SCEI. Sony claim this will do a massive 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance and support Full HD (up to 1080p) allowing "realistic movement of characters and objects" and "real-time rendering of landscapes and virtual worlds". Combining the power of these 2 processors the PlayStation 3 can do an overwhelming 2.18 teraflops, twice what Xbox 360 claims, whether this is true remain to be seen though.

Sony also mentioned that the PS3 will adopt BD-ROM (Blu-ray Disc ROM) with maximum storage capacity of 54 GB, which is about six times the capacity of existing DVDs, a removable 2.5in hard drive, slots for memory cards, a Gigabit Ethernet port and will support up to 4 USB wired controllers or 7 wireless controllers via Bluetooth.

For the full press release and comments from third party developers and publishers click below:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050516/sfm178.html?.v=2

PlayStation 3 Specifications:

Product name: PlayStation 3

CPU:
Cell Processor PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz.
1 VMX vector unit per core.
512KB L2 cache.
7 x SPE @3.2GHz.
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs.
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE (1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy).
total floating point performance : 218 GFLOPS.

GPU:
RSX @550MHz.
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance.
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels.
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines.

Sound:
Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-base processing).

Memory:
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz.
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz.

System Bandwidth:
Main RAM: 25.6GB/s.
VRAM: 22.4GB/s.
RSX: 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read).
SB: 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read).

System Floating Point Performance:
2 TFLOPS.

Storage:
HDD : Detachable 2.5" HDD slot x 1.

I/O:
USB: Front x 4, Rear x 2 (USB2.0)
Memory Stick: standard/Duo, PRO x 1.
SD: standard/mini x 1.
CompactFlash: (Type I, II) x 1.

Communication:
Ethernet: (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) x 3 (input x 1 + output x 2).
Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 b/g.
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR).

Controller:
Bluetooth (up to 7).
USB2.0 (wired).
Wi-Fi (PSP).
Network (over IP).

AV Output:
Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p.
HDMI: HDMI out x 2.
Analog: AV MULTI OUT x 1.
Digital audio: DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) x 1.

Disc media:
CD: PlayStation CD-ROM, PlayStation 2 CD-ROM, CD-DA (CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW), SACD (SACD Hybrid (CD layer), SACD HD), DualDisc (DualDisc (audio side), DualDisc (DVD side)).
DVD: PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM, PlayStation 3 DVD-ROM, DVD-Video (DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW).
Blu-ray Disc: PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, BD-Video (BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE).