… will be launched around this time next year (spring 2006) :-)
The Sony Playstation 3 is very intriguing.
On one hand it is a game console. And I personally don’t care about those… I mean, a Computer Scientist does not have time to play games, isn’t it ???
On the other hand, the Playstation 3 is one hell of a machine according to its specs :
Let’s see.
It uses a Cell processor (jointly developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba) which is, in fact, a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz dispatching tasks to 7 (yes, seven!) vector units each with its own 128 registers and its own memory… The Cell has been announced to perform at 218 GFLOPS compared to my latest AMD Athlon64 3000+ running at 4 GFLOPS. Of course, the question is whether application developers will be able to leverage this power but things depend a lot on the quality of the optimising compilers I suppose as no one now writes directly in Assembly code (especially for RISC architectures)
It also has a GPU from NVidia called the RSX which runs at a maximum of 1.8 TFLOPS (I am feeling dizzy…) and supports 2 channels of high-definition (HD) video. Judging by some screenshots released by Sony, I can tell you that games will be photorealistic.
The Playstation 3 uses Blu-Ray Disc which can hold up to 25 Gb of data compared to the 4.7 Gb found on a single-layer DVD.
Finally, it also can handle up to 7 Bluetooth wireless appliances like a keyboard, a mouse, joypads and what not. It is also fully USB, Wi-fi and Ethernet capable.
The Playstation 3 has only 512 Mb of RAM though. And it does not have a hard-disc which is pretty disapointing.
It has the potential to become the PC killer. For that, it must get additional RAM, a hard-disc and, most important, a real operating system.
Why not Linux ?
From various sources on the net, and from eurogamer I think, they say the hdd will be optional (Detachable 2.5″ HDD slot x 1). Have a look here.
I heard that it’ll be PSP compatible and that the PSP can be used as a controller… I hope much more details will be given in E3 :D
PC Killer? Cell is vastly overhyped just like the EE was and RSX is slower than the upcoming 7800GTX 512MB being released around half a year before it. Perhaps if the PS3 could go back in time 2 years it would be a PC killer.
It’s true that the PS3 is taking a long time to appear…
Now that PCs are moving towards dual-core processors and 3D cards from NVidia and ATI are becoming more and more powerful, do we really need the 218 GFLOPS of the PS3?
Only time will tell ;-)