PlayStation 3 chip to be unveiled
 

Details of the chip designed to power Sony's PlayStation 3 console will be released in San Francisco on Monday.
Sony, IBM and Toshiba, who have been working on the Cell processor for three years, will unveil the chip at a technology conference.

The chip is reported to be up to 10 times faster than current processors.

It is being designed for use in graphics workstations, the new PlayStation console, and has been described as a supercomputer on a chip.

Sony has said the Cell processor could be used to bridge the gap between movies and video games.

Special effects and graphics designed for films could be ported for use directly in a video game, Sony told an audience at the E3 exhibition in Los Angeles last year.

'Ideal technology'

Cell could also be marketed as an ideal technology for televisions and supercomputers, and everything in between, said Kevin Krewell, the editor in chief of Microprocessor Report.

The chip will be made of several different processing cores that work on tasks together.

The PlayStation 3 is expected in 2006 but developers are expecting to get prototypes early next year to tune games that will appear on it at launch.

Details of the chip will be released at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Some details have already emerged, however.

When put inside powerful computer servers, the Cell consortium expects it to be capable of handling 16 trillion floating point operations, or calculations, every second.

Detailed graphics

The chip has also been refined to be able to handle the detailed graphics common in games and the data demands of films and broadband media.

IBM said it would start producing the chip in early 2005 at manufacturing plants in the US. The first machines off the line using the Cell processor will be computer workstations and servers.

A working version of the PS3 is due to be shown off in May 2005 but a full launch of the next generation console is not expected to start until 2006.

"In the future, all forms of digital content will be converged and fused onto the broadband network," said Ken Kutaragi, chief operating officer of Sony, said last year.

"Current PC architecture is nearing its limits," he added.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4242447.stm

I will play games again, when PS3 is out. :)

playstation sucks ass

PS2 is a POS, but PS3 as alot of potential...

BTW here is another article regarding the processor of PS3 - CELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/te...r=MOREOVERNEWS

Should I buy an N5 or a Playstation 3?

just saw it on the news here nice... xbox is so much better now maybe the new ps3 will catch up :)

XBOX has dominated graphics since it came out. But whenever the PS3 comes out.. im sure that will change... then microsoft will dominate again within a year of it coming out.

So which company stock to buy? Who actually developed and will be selling "Cell"?

Xbox Next is expected to be out before PS3 ;) no more 1year advantage to Sony.

PS2 was best for 1 year till XBOX... MS will do the same thing all over.. wait 1 year, then of course new xbox will be better.

According to the article Allan posted:
Sony, IBM and Toshiba developed it.

Giants today and thus this release won't have much of an uppy effect on their stocks.
But if the Cell is revolutionary enough, and they've covered it with shitloads of patents,
I guess it could be worth investing long-term in them.

I will be getting the PS2 the first day it is released for sure.

Really? Didnt know that, ha... cannot WAIT to see the new XBOX

Nvidia is doing the GPU (Graphics processing unit, a special microprocessor used in computer graphics hardware) and on the other side, ATI is doing his part with the Xbox Next.

I am just waiting till the PSP comes out - that thing is sweet and perfect for long plane trips