PS3 article thing

Sony’s Playstation 3, debuting today, is an anticipated “next generation” game console. Many titles are scheduled for launch alongside the PS 3 along with releases in the near future, such as Call of Duty 3, F.E.A.R., Madden NFL 07, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire, Need for Speed Carbon, Resistance: Fall of Man, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas and Tony Hawk’s Project 8.

Sales Campaign

Game pricing for first party game titles will be priced at $59.99. Pricing for third party game titles are expected to carry the same price tag, although there is some doubt of that, considering that the pricing design has not yet been released for third party games.

Much like the launch of the Xbox 360, the PS 3 will have two different packages, one being more expensive than the other. There is a $599 package that will have a 60GB hard drive, WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) and card reader memory ports. The cheaper package runs at $499 and comes with a 20GB hard drive.

The highly anticipated release of Sony’s PS 3 has obviously led to their new $150 million advertising campaign that includes a strange assortment of television commercials, one of which features a baby doll sitting on the floor staring at the console and laughing. This commercial is meant to capture the curiosity of the viewers and intrigue them, along with their other advertisements.

PS 3 will be equipped with all new Blue Tooth wireless controllers. Blue Tooth is a high range and speed wireless internet being adapted by most technologies today. The first 500,000 units that are sold of the PS 3 will be sold with a Blu-ray (BD-Blu-ray Disc) copy of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, included to help promote the Blu-ray system being used by Sony’s Playstation 3. 

The Hardware

Now for the breakdown of the console’s vital parts. The basic thing is that overall the PS 3 has more raw power than its main competitor, Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Many disagree with that and still believe the 360 is more powerful, which in a sense, it is, at PS 3’s launch, of course, because Microsoft currently has better software that coincide with the Xenon CPU’s (central processing unit). After a while, PS 3 will eventually catch up sooner or later and come out to outperform the 360.

Now to breaking down the specifications into highly detailed explanations. Also for those who do not understand, the details will be explained in more simple terms.

The CPU (Central Processing Unit)

Comparing the PS 3 to the 360, the PS 3 has one main core clocked (running) at 3.2 gigahertz (“ghz”, hertz means a cycle, giga equals one billion) with 7 SPE’s (Synergistic Processing Elements) also running at 3.2ghz each. The 360 has 3 CPU’s clocked at 3.2ghz each (meaning PS3 has one general use CPU while the Xbox 360 has 3) and also has two threads with each core, while PS 3 has two threads on the main core and one on each SPE, leaving 9 total. The PS 3 also has double the amount of FLOPS (2 teraFLOPS; terra equals one trillion) than the next generation Xbox. FLOPS are Floating Point Operations per Second, which involve algorithmic functions calculating processes.

RAM (Random Access Memory) and Bandwidth

RAM is basically the horse power of a car. Without high RAM, the processor isn’t much. Both consoles have the same amount of memory; the main difference is that the 360 has 512MB (thousand bytes; bytes is a unit of storage for information) unified GDDR3 (Graphics Double Data Rate 3) RAM. PS 3 has 256MB of XDR and 256MB of GDDR3. XDR was designed to be effective in small, high-bandwidth consumer systems, high-performance memory applications, and high-end GPU’s (Graphics Processing Unit). They both have the same amount of memory space, but the Xbox 360 has more bandwidth (available processing speed).  Although Sony is overpowered in that race, it is still in the lead because the design of the SPE’s allow a smaller need for extra bandwidth.

The GPU (Graphical Processing Unit)

The GPU, the powerhouse for graphics, the Xenos for the Xbox 360 and the RSX for the PS3 both are high powered. RSX can stand toe to toe with Xenos in most areas, but RSX’s pixel shading ability is greater than that of Xenos, and it just happens to be one of, if not the single most, important metric for games this generation. Everything is important, but some things are more important than others. Pixel shading ability is one of those things, since it is involved with pretty much everything shown on screen, and it’s one of the more scarce resources still. On paper, RSX and Xenos are very similar but when looking at the detailed architectures, both have some pretty decent advantages over the other. Some are that Xenos has more “pipelines” in which the information can flow, while the RSX has less, but amount doesn’t mean everything. The pipelines in the RSX is expected to feature 24 pixel and 8 vertex pipelines all in parallel. The function of the vertex pipeline in any GPU is to take geometry data (usually supplied as vector points), work with a vertex shader program, and create all of the 3D data points in a scene to a 2D plane for display on a computer monitor.

Something Blue

Sony competes against Toshiba’s HD DVD (used by the 360) with their recently (2004) patented Blu-ray player. Both offer true HD (High Definition) imagery. The HD DVD holding  30GB while the BD holding 50 GB. The BD player is able to play and burn every other type of media storage except for the HD DVD. BD can support up to 1080p (1920x1080 dots on screen) bringing a “true HD effect.” Toshiba cannot support the 1080p feature yet, but is working on it due to the larger amount of HD monitors and TV’s

With all these features, powerful and opportunity opening hardware, Sony is hoping for a great debut and future.