Sony announces PS3

Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (SCEI) have announced details of its upcoming PlayStation 3 console at a press conference in Los Angeles.

At the heart of the new console was the Cell processor which Sony jointly developed with IBM and Toshiba. The processor was capable of 218 GFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second), Sony said in a statement.

"Empowered by the Cell processor with super computer like performance, a new age of PlayStation 3 is about to begin.  Together with content creators from all over the world, SCEI will accelerate the arrival of a new era in computer entertainment,” said Ken Kutaragi, president and CEO of SCEI.

Rambus provided the 256MB XDR main memory for the console while NVIDIA co-developed the RSX graphics processor with SCEI. The processor was capable of 1.8 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second), Sony said.

The console featured two high definition outputs supporting 1080p as standard, which is the highest resolution in the HD standard, the company said.

Support for all popular CD and DVD formats were included as well as support for Blu-ray media. BD-ROM (Blu-ray Disc ROM) media had maximum storage capacity of 54GB, Sony said.

The console is expected to be released in the second quarter of 2006.

According to Sony, the PlayStation 3 would also be backwards compatible, giving gamers access to the library of over 13,000 titles that has already been developed for the PS and PS2 consoles.

"With PlayStation 3 it looks as if it might be time for interactive entertainment to become, finally, the world's dominant artistic medium, " said Sam Houser, president of Rockstar Games.

A prototype of the console would be shown at E3, the world's largest entertainment exhibition in Los Angeles from 18 to 20 May.

Release of details about PlayStation 3 comes on the heels of Microsoft's Xbox 360 announcement last week.