This is it... PS3.

May 13th, 2005. A day that will be remembered for a very, very long time. The place was Sony's pre-E3 press conference in Los Angeles and the company spent 1 hour 50 minutes unveiling the Playstation 3. Well, OK, Square also showed off Final Fantasy XII on PS2 for a couple of minutes, but the rest was all about the Playstation 3 - which was also confirmed as the official name of the system. There was little doubt that Sony would show off the system - but the dominance over the XBox 360 was stunning. Games such as Killzone, Resistance and Eyedentify blew away everything Microsoft had to show.

May 8th, 2006. Sony's second big showing of the Playstation 3 was at E3 2006, and this time the demos were live, being played, and looking stunning. There were some changes and surprses. Firstly there will be two different PS3's, one with 60Gb hard drive, HDMI and Wireless networking and a second system with 20GB hard drive, no HDMI, and no wireless. The insides of the system are, however identical. Below is a quick comparison table between the XBox 360 and Playstation 3, and further down some more detailed PS3 specs.

Look at the table. Not much really where you could claim the XBox 360 is ahead. Perhaps a bit more RAM, but the PS3's RAM (or at least half of it) is much faster so that should put that ahead. In terms of video the HDMI 1.3 spec allows for not only HD video (1080p) but also the HD audio which will be used in upcoming Blu-Ray movies. Blu-Ray movies for those unaware are one of two upcoming competing formats (the other being the lower capacity HD-DVD). All Blu-Ray movies are encoded at 1080p (1920 x 1080 resolution, compared to 720 x 576 for PAL DVD's). Another big annoucement is that the controller, as well as being wireless, will be tilt sensitive so you can tip it to move things in the game world. Sadly it also loses the rumble feature. Anyway enough of the talk. Here's the hard facts for PS3 and images of the system - including the new controller design.

Product name: PLAYSTATION 3

The Cell CPU close up.

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 additional SPE is not used, while one of 7 good SPE's is reserved for Operating System
Total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

nVidia RSX @ 550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full 1080p (1920 x 1080 progressive)
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

The wireless, tilting, controller.

Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-based processing)

256MB XDR Main RAM @ 3.2GHz
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @ 700MHz

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

2.5" 20GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (on cheaper model)
2.5" 60GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (on dearer model)
* The system will allow users to install any 2.5" Hard Drive.

20Gb system (left) and 60Gb system (right).

USB 2.0 ports x 4
Memory Stick/SD/CompactFlash (only on dearer model)

Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR)
Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T)
Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 b/g (only on dearer model)

Bluetooth (up to 7 controllers)
Tilt sensitive for motion control
Removal of rumble feature
USB 2.0 (wired to recharge, or play when flat)
Wi-Fi (PSP)

Laying the system down...

Screen size: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
HDMI: HDMI 1.3 (only on dearer model)
Analog: AV MULTI OUT
Digital audio: Optical Out

CD 24x: 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 8x: PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM, PlayStation 3 DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW
Blu-ray 2x: PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, BD-Video, BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE

Approximately 325mm (W) x 98mm (H) x 274mm (D)

Apprximately 5kg