Comparisons are going to be inevitable between the Xbox 360 and PS3.  And to tell you the truth, there is no comparison.  It seems the two companies are going to switch side in another year, it’ll be the Xbox 360 that offers less performance at a lower price than the coming PS3. 

Sony unveiled technical specifications but not the actual name of the coming PS3 (which will have to serve for now as the unofficial name for the device).  It’ll feature the cutting edge “Cell” processor, made from “learning” microbial tissue that will quickly overtake your simple neuron based consciousness for an unparalleled gaming experience.  Okay, I’m just kidding about that last part but swimming through PS3 specs is a bit daunting, it seems they’ve really pulled out the stops with processing technology.  The “cell” processor is a next generation CPU that will run at 3.2 Ghz giving Playstation 3 almost three full teraflops of floating point processing power.  Graphics power will be brought to us by NVIDIA’s RSX “Reality Synthesizer” capable of 100 Billion shader operations and 51 billion dots per second.  The engineering of the GPU will be truly cutting edge with 300 million individual transistors made with the Moore’s Law driving 90nm process.  Using 90nm process transistors will have a gate oxide that is only five atomic layers thick.  The cost of making this chip today would be $1000 U.S. dollars and that's just the graphics processor alone.  The GPU will be capable of producing images at 1080P and its significant data will race from PS3’s built in HDMI port available to communicate with the rest of your gear.

Sony is going out on its decidedly thick and powerful corporate limbs to promise this in mass production by the release date of next spring.  Naturally Sony’s coming product will stand firmly behind its own Blu-Ray technology as its exclusive optical storage medium.  Blu-Ray is capable of over six times the data storage as DVD.  PS3 will be backward compatible to everything all the way back to Sony’s original Playstation.    The targeted release date is to be spring of 2006, Sony has its work cut out for it to produce this groundbreaking piece of hardware at a viable consumer price in mass production in that short a time.  I’ve never been a fan of Sony or any of its gaming platforms or any other endeavor outside their TVs.  But if Sony can pull this off; in the words of the immortal Mike Tyson, “I take my hand off to you.”