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PS3 / HUB Launch Date Rumors

Sony Playstation3 (PS3) | HUB stir the gaming community with rumors of release dates.

Rumor has it September 2006 would be the month when PS3 HUB will be launched in Japan and the US. There are also talks on the possibility of Sony's PS3 HUB features including voice-chat and downloading games, very similar to those of Xbox 360's Live, but also Sony gimmicks like PSP online gaming and a media content-distribution network.

During the 2006 CONSUMER ELECTRONICS SHOW in Las Vegas, Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation, mentioned Playstation3 (PS3) as one of the four pillars of Sony's vision toward the future.

Sony Computer Entertainment America, President and CEO Kaz Hirai, joined Mr. Howard Stringer in debating the evolution of PLAYSTATION3 considering the incredible success of the PlayStation2 (PS2 experienced a 10.5 pct year-over-year gain in holiday sales and was the only platform in the videogame industry with positive growth), and the success of the PlayStation® Portable (PSP®).

Mr. Hirai also emphasized the importance of the Cell processor, which is designed to support broadband consumer applications and HD video streams and will be at the heart of the PLAYSTATION 3, scheduled to launch "later this year". By utilizing Blu-ray, PLAYSTATION 3 will also provide the large storage capacity required by game creators to achieve real-time gameplay mechanics in a true HD world.

The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is Sony's 7th generation PlayStation video game console. Its main rivals are Nintendo Revolution and the Xbox 360.

Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi:

"It'll be expensive; I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to. But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. So we're going to have to do our best [in containing the price]".

Sony Computer Entertainment America president, Kazuo Hirai, considers that the Playstation3 will be competitively priced against the Xbox 360.

Expected specifications are:

Central processing unit

3.2 GHz Cell processor with 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). Only 7, however, are active. The 8th SPE is there for redundancy: if one of the other 7 are defective the 8th SPE will activate and stand in for the defective part.

Graphics processing unit

Custom RSX or "Reality Synthesizer" design co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony. It is clocked at 550 MHz, features full high definition output (up to 1080p) x 2 channels, 1.8 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second), Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines, 136 shader operations per clock, 74.8 billion shader operations per second (100 billion with CPU), 33 billion dot products per second (51 billion dot products with CPU), and 128-bit pixel precision.

NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated during Sony's pre-show press conference at E3 2005 that the RSX will be more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards combined.

Memory

256 MB Rambus XDR DRAM clocked at CPU die speed (3.2 GHz)

256 MB GDDR3 VRAM clocked at 700 MHz

Audio/video output

Supported screen sizes: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p; two HDMI (Type A) outputs (Dual-screen HD outputs); S/PDIF optical output for digital audio; multiple analog outputs (Composite, S-Video, Component video)

Sound

Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS, LPCM (DSP functionality handled by the Cell processor)

Communications

3 Gigabit Ethernet ports, IEEE 802.11g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, and USB 2.0 (four front and two rear ports)