The third generation of the PlayStation will be turning and kicking, come 2006

At the Sony pre-E3 conference Monday, Sony displayed for the world their new addition to the family. In many ways complementary to the previous Xbox 360 revealing on MTV, this conference not only confirmed the name (if you had any doubt, it’s still PS3) but confirmed the system stats, controller look, and backing from various major game developers. Let’s take a look:

It’s sleek and black, convex and mature, and almost too intimidating; the style of the PlayStation 3 is much like it’s predecessor but with more power, much, much more. Running off the Cell Processor, the PS3 is quite the beast: a 3.2 GHz speed with 2 teraflops of processing power, 256mb XDR Ram running at 3.2 GHz…you can find the complete specs below. What’s shocking is that the GPU (the RSX) will be able to produce 128bit pixel precision a whopping 1080p resolution, and, to top it all off, the graphics card, developed by nVidia, will be more powerful than just about anything available on the market now, with 512 mb clocked at 550 MHz… There’s no doubt that the PS3 is an incredibly powerful machine.

As for design, I’m not sure if I really like the convex shape of the top - the XBox 360 is concave - but the PS3 does look aggressive, as I mentioned earlier. The PS3 controllers are no longer a minor renovation of the DualShock series. In fact, they’re quite unique this time around. The controller looks like a jet-black banana (one of our writers called it a Batarang) with all the standard buttons and features of the DualShock 1 and 2. Looking at the controller reminds one of a stealth bomber, the handles are elongated and smooth, but because no one (except Sony) has yet handled it, there’s no way to know how it really measures up. Upon closer inspection, the X, Square, Circle, and Triangle buttons slope slightly inwards, as does the D-pad. We believe this had been adjusted for ergonomics, but how this will affect the analogs is yet to be seen. The top buttons are still in classic form, and so to reach them the controller was made smaller than it appears in photos.

Sony also showed off two other colors of the PlayStation 3, or shades, anyway: gray and white. They seem to be going toward the direction of personalization, but in a way not to the extreme of the XBox 360’s face-plate swap.

Sony also showed off a number of demos. There was in-game PlayStation 3 game footage: a new Tekken and the Unreal 3 among others. And then followed a number of game developers expressing their support for Sony’s new console.

Sony announced the general date for the console of sometime 2006. But since Microsoft’s entry to the next-generation race is almost forcing Sony to jump the gun with their launch, it is possible we might see the PS3 as early as Spring 2006, not Christmas.

PlayStation 3: Official Specs 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 TFLOPS

Storage

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 2.0 (EDR)

Controller

Bluetooth (up to 7) USB 2.0 (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

We’ll have more impressions of PS3 games on the E3 floor starting Wednesday.