Playstation 3 to arrive in nine months

As well as using the Cell chip, courtesy of IBM, Toshiba and itself, the console will also use Blu-Ray drives and as we mentioned in an earlier story, Rambus XDR memory and an Nvidia processor.

Microsoft with its Xbox 360 will pip Sony to the post with a machine, but that doesn't necessarily guarantee success.

As well as vastly improved performance over its predecessor, the machine can display on high definition TV sets and has powerful wireless capabilities as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port.

It will also run games written for the Playstation and the Playstation 2, while it supports better multiplayer use.

Here are the specifications of the Playstation 3 in full:
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 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)
System Floating Point Performance: 2 TFLOPS
Storage: HDD 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 Bluetooth 2.0 (EDR) Controller: Bluetooth (up to 7) USB2.0 (wired) Wi-Fi (PSP(R)) 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(R) CD-ROM
* read only PlayStation(R)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(R)2 DVD-ROM PLAYSTATION(R)3 DVD-ROM DVD-Video DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW Blu-ray Disc PLAYSTATION(R)3 BD-ROM BD-Video BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE

The firm said a number of games developers have already started working on software for the machine which will be ready at launch. µ