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Revision as of 20:34, 11 September 2004 by Wmahan (talk | contribs) (external link to wikilink)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be the new upcoming video game console in Sony's PlayStation series. IBM has won the contract to produce microchips for this new console. Sony said that there are hopes that the PS3 will be 1,000 times as powerful as the PlayStation 2 (PS2), though such a claim may be exaggerated as it would be far ahead of what Moore's Law would predict.
Sony will be using a chip codenamed "Cell", which has now taped out, and chip-to-chip interface technology and memory technology from Rambus. The first public demonstration has been announced for the 2005 E3 conference.
Simplex Solutions has said that they are developing the GS (graphics synthesizer) chip that will go with the PS3. It will be a 0.18 micrometre chip about twice the size of the PS2 version. Also, it will feature 256MB of DRAM and will be able to handle 75 million polygons per second with a rate of up to 2.6 billion pixels a second. The DRAM will be XDR-DRAM which will begin production mid-2005.
Instead of using the DVD standard of the Playstation 2, Sony has announced that it will use Blu-ray Discs. Since these two standards are not compatible it is possible that Sony will include a secondary drive in order to play DVD movies and Playstation 2 games. This would increase the cost and size of the console and may therefore not happen.
"This isn't just an extension of what we've done in the past. We're aiming to create something fundamentally different," said a Sony spokesman.
Fans have already started designing PS3 Pictures of what they think the console will look like. However, there have not been any official designs fron Sony as of yet. Dedicated Sony loyalists have also formed a PS3 Forum, which they use to discuss all aspects of the next generation gaming system.
Currently, PlayStation 3 is estimated to be available sometime in 2006, but recent developments suggests that it may in fact arrive as late as 2007.
PlayStation 3 Standards
Unlike the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 systems, Sony appears to have chosen publicly-available application programming interfaces for the PlayStation 3. The current list of open standards Sony is either investigating or has chosen includes:
- OpenGL ES, the embedded version of the popular OpenGL graphics API.
- OpenVG, for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics.
- OpenMAX, a collection of fast, cross-platform tools for general "media acceleration," such as matrix calculations.
- COLLADA, an open format for 3D models.
References
- IBM wins Playstation 3 contract, 12 March 2001 on BBC
- Playstation 3 News Archive PS3 News
- Sony may swap properietary API for 'Open' one EE Times