Sony PlayStation 3 details and photos

Sony yesterday presented its PlayStation 3 at a press conference in Los Angeles. The company released lots of technical details about its next-generation console and showed off the console.

The PS3 is powered by the Cell processor which was developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. The RSX graphics solution comes from NVIDIA and Sony and the XDR memory was developed by Rambus. The console also supports Blu-ray Disc ROMs with a maximum capacity of 54GB. The PS3 also supports 1080p as standard, which is superior to 720p/1080i. The new console will be backward compatible with games from the PS2 and PSOne, just like the Xbox 360 features backward compatibility for Xbox games.

Sony said the computing power of its PS3 is 2 teraflops, almost twice as much as Microsoft's Xbox 360. The company explained it will allow entire new graphical expressions that have never been seen before. Not only will character's movement and objects become far more refined and realistic, it will also allow landscapes and virtual worlds to be rendered in real-time. Sony says gamers will dive into realistic worlds as seen in large screen movies and experience the excitement in real-time.

The Sony PlayStation 3 is planned for Spring 2006. Microsoft last week announced it will launch its Xbox in November 2005.

PlayStation 3 Specifications:

• 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

Nine pictures of the console and its controller can be seen at CNET. A few ingame screenshots of the PS3 can be found at Engadget. The games look truly impressive.