“In a glitzy ceremony held at Sony’s film studios here on Monday, the company released eagerly anticipated details of its upcoming PlayStation 3 and said the console would reach shelves in spring 2006,” Richard Shim and John Borland report for CNET News. “Boasting a new chip touted as being as fast or faster than the most powerful personal computers on the market today, the new console is designed to be a huge step forward from today’s gaming consoles, as well as a key element of a broader networked home entertainment system.”
“According to the company, the new console will have wireless controllers, a detachable 2.5-inch hard drive, slots for compact flash and Sony’s memory stick media and a built-in Wi-Fi connection that can connect to the Playstation Portable,” Shim and Borland report. “‘The network is going to be a core part of the PS3,’ Masa Chatani, Chief Technology Officer of Sony Computer Entertainment. The system will include USB 2.0 and gigabit Ethernet connections, and will support games made for previous generations of PlayStation systems, executives said. It will include support for up to seven controllers at once, providing much-expanded possibilities for multiplayer games. The core processor will run at 3.2GHz, rather than the previously reported 4GHz. The company provided no information on expected price.”
“At the core of Sony’s new game machine is a speedy new chip developed by IBM and Toshiba, called the Cell. The chip is expected to be used in graphics design workstations, as well as in the game system,” Shim and Borland report. “With a radical new design that includes nine separate processors, with one controlling ‘brain’ that will divvy up tasks among its eight peers…”
Full article with more details here.
PlayStation 3 specs here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
RUMOR: Sony and Apple working together on PlayStation 3 – May 13, 2005
New Sony NAS-CZ1 Network Audio System the first non-Apple player to support iTunes Music Store DRM – April 18, 2005
Why only 7 controllers? seems kinda stupid to put all that functionality into it without allowing for an even 8 players on one console…
Holy cow. Sony’s tripled me.
So much for that Apple/Sony Playstation rumor…
well with 7 controllers that’ll be one small screen divided up. I remember playing mario cart with only two people and that was bad enough…. imagine 7 people on one tv screen….
HOLLY SH*T!
WHat is nintendo going to do?
WWDC will be very interesting
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Let´s have a Longhorn BBQ there!
You mean let’s BBQ Longhorn there?
Is that the sound of the Xbox360 getting ****ed like a little bitch? LOL
Sorry M$, but I certainly know what my next console will be now…and it sure as hell won’t be that ugly assed Xbox 360 for damn sure!
Sean..
Let´s BBQ Longhorn BBQ =)
Barbequed Longhorn la Carte.. öör something
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Yeah, this was always the competition that the XBox 360 was facing–not the Mac Mini, for sure!
It seems you guys missed this ‘lil nugget:
“The chip is expected to be used in graphics design workstations, as well as in the game system”
Hmmm…I wonder what graphics design workstations are being referred to here?
Nother interesting fact: Now both Sony and M$ are using variations of the IBM Power architecture. I _have_ to think this is good news for Apple: not only a validation of superior chip architecture, but porting games from either system should be pretty darned easy now, compared to porting from the X86 platform….
IBM is making all these chips for game consoles. No wonder they can’t make a 3.0 GHz chip for Apple.
Yeah, but will it support HD games? If not, then pfft…
if you click on the featured links you will see that it does support HD games
Yes, this is very bad news for those who’ve bet their house on x86.
How long before MS release a build of Windows for PPC?
PS3 also offers backwards compatibility with previous generation games- that is a HUGE plus. Microsoft nicely side stepped that issue.
Tell me this gamers- why would anyone want to drop $2-$3k on a “gaming PC” when they can spend far, far less on a gaming console that is a powerful as either the PS3 or the Xbox 360? Kind of makes the “no games for a Mac” argument kind of moot. Dedicated gaming consoles make far more sense. The announcements from Sony and MS reinforce that fact.
g$: too true.
Of course, the dedicated game console made more sense even before these announcements.
But I’ll let that one go; Wintel patchers need something to crow about even if it is completely illogical and insane (“My $2K Wintel is better for playing games than your $2K Macintosh, nah, nah, nah, nah, boo, boo”).
Yikes.
With the announcement of the specs of both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, I hope that Apple is doing everything it can to leverage the PowerPC technology that is going into these game consoles in a very serious way.
With the introduction of these machines, Apple needs to do something about getting ahead of the curve in terms of hardware, instead of resorting to defensive maneuvers (PowerMacs and PowerBooks, anyone?)
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 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
• SACDL: 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)
HOLY…Look at the floating point and system bandwidth! Both of these units SOUNDLY spank modern high end computers even if they are ordered/un-ordered. That cell chip on the link looks almost too tiny to be true with that many cores. It seems that Sony’s PS3 soundly annihilates the Xbox 360. Wow…just wow. Hopefully their network infrastructure is as good/better than Msofts.
When exactly is spring in the U.S. ? Is that xmas time or a bit after ?
and considering the PS3 won’t be out for another year, so it should pants the Xbox.
The specs on both the box and station sound unbelievable. Forget games, why can’t they make a computer that good.
“The specs on both the box and station sound unbelievable. Forget games, why can’t they make a computer that good.”
Larry makes a good point. I think Apple will need to change their approach to designing Mac hardware. If game consoles are going to be this powerful, the dual 2.7 Ghz PowerMac is going to look like a Mac Mini in comparison to the PS3.
Maybe they need to begin designing Macs as a next gen game console with a Mac OS X operating system.