PlayStation 3

The Sony PlayStation 3 will be Sony's new upcomming video game console. IBM has won the contract to produce microchips for this new console. Sony said that there a hopes that the PS3 will be 1,000 time as powerful as the PlayStation 2 was.

The chip, codenamed "Cell" which will feature 0.10 mircon technology, will be desgined for broadband, allowing communciation with intelligent devices and the internet. There will be software that somes with the PS3 for online shopping, backing, and other services.

The chip is currently being developed at an IBM labratory in Austin, Texas, and will be produced at a plant in East Fishkill, New York at a cost of $3 billion.

Simplex Solutions has said that they are develiping the GS (graphics synthesizer) chip that will go with the PS3. It will be a 0.18 micron chip about twice the size of the PS2 version. Also, it will feature 256 mb of DRAM and will be able to handle 75 million polygons per second with a rate of up to 2.6 billion pixels a second.

"This isn't just an extension of what we've done in the past. We're aiming to create something fundamentally different," said a Sony spokesman.

Right now, it looks like the PlayStation 3 will ship in 2002.