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Template:Future product

The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is Sony's next generation video game console in the market-leading PlayStation series, slated for release in the first half of 2006. It is the successor to the PlayStation 2 and will mainly compete against the Nintendo Revolution and Xbox 360. Sony has announced that the PS3 will be backward compatible with PS1 and PS2 games. At the moment, little more is known in public about the PS3 apart from its hardware specifications and reports that it will be based on open APIs for game development.

Cost and release date

More information on the price and release date may be made available at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held from January 5 to January 8 2006 in Las Vegas.

The system's retail price has not been confirmed. To compete with the upper price ceiling of the Xbox 360, the PS3 will most likely sell in the U.S. for $400-$500 (£283, €416). Sony Computer Entertainment president and "father of the PlayStation" Ken Kutaragi points out "It'll be expensive" and "I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to," said Kutaragi to a mostly Japanese crowd. "But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. So we're going to have to do our best ". In contrast Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, says the PS3 will not be expensive and that it will be competitively priced against the Xbox 360.

More recently, however, a report compiled by Merrill Lynch Japan and published in the business magazine Toyo Keizai estimated the total cost of producing a PS3 at launch time at ¥54,000, or US$451 (£263, €385) (the most expensive components, the Cell microprocessor, the RSX graphics processing unit, and the BD-ROM drive are each estimated to cost US$101 (£59, €86), with the additional cost going into the motherboard, RAM, wireless chipsets, and probably system-on-a-chip implementations of the PS1 and PS2 systems for backwards compatibility). Sony is already making efforts to control manufacturing costs, and may even go as far as dropping the system's planned integrated router to reduce expenses. In the same report, Merrill Lynch predicts that Sony will initially sell the PlayStation 3 for ¥44,800 (US$374) in Japan, and US$399 (£232, €340) in the USA, taking a financial loss (as it did with the PlayStation 2) in order to build the console's install base, losing as much as US$1 billion in the first year after release. Sony would later recoup this loss (as well as the Cell's US$1.8 (£1.01, €1.53) billion ( R&D expenses) through software licensing fees and future reduced hardware manufacturing costs. The report also notes that Microsoft may plan to disrupt the normal console business cycle by choosing to cut the price of the Xbox 360 at the same time the PS3 launches, which the report estimates would cause Sony to lose an additional US$730 (£426, €622) million in its second year, and US$457 million in its third. It is not known whether these hypothetical losses would be due to Sony being forced to further cut the price of the PS3 hardware, or suffering reduced revenue from game purchases due to stiff competition from Microsoft.

For the consumer this means one will be able to buy a PlayStation 3 at a lower price than its actual manufacturing cost.

In the same magazine, Ken Kutaragi was interviewed, and expressed little concern over the PS3's possibly high launch price, believing that customers would be willing to pay extra for a superior product, as they had in the past for the original PlayStation (¥39,800 vs. 12,500 for the Super Famicom).

During its E3 presentation, Sony confirmed the PlayStation 3 will be available around early 2006. Reports quoting high-ranking Sony officials suggest the PlayStation 3 may be launched simultaneously in Japan and North America (not worldwide), a tactic that would differ significantly from the PlayStation (launched December 1994 in Japan and September 1995 in North America) and PlayStation 2 (launched March 2000 in Japan and October 2000 in North America).

Some industry critics had speculated that due to many of its monumental technical challenges, Sony could delay the release of the PlayStation 3 up to early 2007. However, according to German website Gamefront, chairman and CEO of the European brand Sony Entertainment, Sir Howard Stringer has added confirmation to Sony’s E3 press release that the company indeed launches its next generation console in the first half of 2006.

Hardware specifications

A simple comparison of the system architectures appears to indicate that the floating point capability of the PS3 is as good or better than the Xbox 360. It should be noted that this figure is based on the combined floating point capacity of the Cell microprocessor and the RSX GPU in the PS3 compared to the combined capacity of the Xenon CPUs and Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360. The amount of completely programmable floating point capacity afforded by the Cell microprocessor for general-purpose tasks, like procedural content generation and game physics, is equal to or slightly higher than that of the Xbox 360's CPU, while the floating-point performance of the two systems' GPUs, which are designed specifically for graphics rendering tasks, are somewhat closer to parity. Many hardware analysts and developers have stated that the real world performance of the PS3 should equal that of the Xbox 360.

According to a press release by Sony at the May 16 2005 E3 Conference, the specifications of the PlayStation 3 are as follows.

Central processing unit

3.2 GHz Cell processor:

• 1 PPE (PowerPC-derived)
  • 32 KB L1 cache
  • 512 KB L2 cache
  • VMX vector unit (IBM's branding for AltiVec)
  • Two hardware threads
• 7 SPE (Synergistic Processing Elements) vector processor units
  • 256 KB SRAM local memory for each SPE
  • 218 GFLOPS theoretical (billion floating point operations per second)
  • 134 GFLOPS attainable
  • 128×128-bit SIMD general purpose register files
• 234 million transistors
• 213 million available transistors due to the one disabled SPE
• 2.3 MB SRAM total (512 KB L2 cache and 1.79 MB SPE local memory)

Each chip includes 8 SPEs, but one is most likely disabled to improve yields and reduce costs

Graphics processing unit

Custom "RSX" or "Reality Synthesizer" design co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony:

• Clocked at 550 MHz
• 1.8 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second)
• Full high definition output (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
• Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
• 136 shader operations per cycle
• 100 billion shader operations per second (with CPU)
• 51 billion dot products per second (with CPU)
• 128-bit pixel precision offers rendering of scenes with high dynamic range imaging

NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated during Sony's pre-show press conference at E3 2005 that the RSX will be much more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards combined. Current industry speculation is that the RSX may be based on the G70 architecture used in NVidia's GeForce 7 Series GPUs which were introduced in June of 2005, but implementing many more parallel pixel and shader pipelines than any consumer PC GPU (NVidia's top-of-the-line GeForce 7800 GTX currently contains 24 pixel and 8 vertex pipelines), and clocked higher than any PC GPU based on G70 (with speculation that the RSX chip will be reworked using the new G71 architecture topping 650-700 MHz and an improved vertex pipeline support, as well as an increased 512mb memory) (again, the 7800 GTX is clocked at 430 MHz, compared to 550-600 MHz for the RSX). An nVidia spokesperson was quoted in PlayStation Magazine as saying that the 7800GTX "shares a lot of similar inner workings with the PS3's RSX chip, only it (the 7800GTX) isn't nearly as fast (as the RSX)."

Memory

• 256 MiB Rambus XDR DRAM clocked at CPU die speed (3.2 GHz)
• 256 MiB GDDR3 VRAM clocked at 700 MHz

Theoretical system bandwidth

• 25.6 GB/s GPU to XDR DRAM: 64 bits × 3.2 GHz
• 22.4 GB/s GPU to GDDR-3 VRAM: 128 bits × 700 MHz × 2 accesses per clock cycle (one per edge)
• 35 GB/s GPU to CPU (Aggregated 20 GB/s (write), 15 GB/s (read))
• 5 GB/s System Bus (Aggregated 2.5 GB/s upstream and downstream)
• 300 GB/s Cell EIB
• 76.8 GB/s Cell FlexIO Bus (44.8 GB/s outbound, 32 GB/s inbound)

Since the RSX is connected to the XDR DRAM and GDDR3 RAM similar to a Turbo Cached GPU it can access both memory locations at the exact same time. This gives the RSX an effective 48GB/s when sending data to/from GPU and RAM.

Overall floating-point capability

In a slide show at their E3 conference, Sony presented the "CPU floating point capability" of the PlayStation 3's Cell CPU, and compared it to other CPU's. The presentation shows that one PS3 Cell CPU alone is capable of 218 GFLOPS, compared to the Xbox 360's Xenon CPUs' 115 GFLOPS, and the floating point performance of an "average" PC CPU of about 8 GFLOPS. In their official press release, the same statistic regarding the PS3 as a whole was reported to be over 2.1 [[F