Sony Shows Off PlayStation 3 Chip

PS3 could still debut before E3, as Sony, Toshiba and IBM unveil the supposedly incredible Cell processor in San Francisco.

Five years after bringing the world the PlayStation 2, Sony is setting the stage to unveil its successor later this year. At the International Solid State Circuits Conference, taking place in San Francisco this week, Sony showed off the heart of the upcoming PlayStation 3, the Cell processor.

Touted by its creators as a supercomputer-on-a-chip, Cell will work together with Nvidia's new graphics technology to take the PlayStation platform to the next generation. The chip is an nine-cored parallel multiprocessor that comes in at 4 GHz. According to some benchmarks, Cell will be 10 times faster than current microprocessors in certain applications.

PS3 should be capable of utterly stunning games experiences with the power afforded by the new Cell processor

But it's not just videogame hardware that will benefit from the new-found power. Sony, Toshiba and IBM, the co-creators of the new chip, are planning to push Cell as a multipurpose processor for the next era of digital technology. This is helped by the operating system-agnostic design of the chip, which means that it can be implemented in machines with vastly different functions and designs.

Already Cell has been confirmed to appear in professional computer workstations, but its creators say it could end up in everything from televisions to mobile phones.

The PlayStation 3 will be the among the first pieces of hardware to use the new Cell chip. While it was believed that the new console would debut at May's E3 conference in Los Angeles, recent comments from Sony representatives in the US suggest that it might be even earlier.

Sony's videogame industry rivals, Nintendo and Microsoft, are also going to be showing off their new hardware at E3 and the first of the new consoles could be in stores as soon as this Christmas.

Find out more about PlayStation 3 right here.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games