As the March date for Sony's official presentation of the PS3 and its technical details approaches, the Wall Street Journal has jumped the gun and spilled the beans on some of those details.
The newspaper claims that the triumvirate responsible for the Cell processor, the power house behind the PS3, has very ambitious plans for it, plans that extend well beyond its presence in a gaming console. Sony, IBM and Toshiba, developers of the Cell architecture, plan to go head-to-head against Microsoft's and Intel's plans to dominate the living room with their products. Most of you will remember Bill Gates, at CES earlier this year, claiming, again and again, that XBox 2 will be a multimedia content distribution device as well as a games console. It is obvious that the Cell will challenge those plans by pitting Sony's PS3 console against the XBox 2 (or whatever name it ends up having).
The Journal also gave away some of the technical specifications of the Cell architecture. According to the paper then the cell chip will include a processing chip which will be to share tasks with another 8 processors. This would mean that it would be able to process up to 10 sets of instructions per cycle, compared to the 2 sets that an x86 system can.
Although these details sound very good, a big challenge for the design will be to create a desktop system based on it which content developers will be able to use without having to burn their University degrees. All this of course is important until Sony makes things official, hopefully releasing even more information regarding Cell's potential.
