Uhhh... last I heard. Both Sony and IBM representitives have gone on record as saying that the "Cell" chip they\'re developing (along with Toshiba) is not going to be in the PS3. Their hopes are to get this single chip to be almost on par or just slightly below the preformance of IBM\'s "Deep Blue" supercomputer. Expect the chip to be extreemly expensive and (most likely) not to meet the hopeful 2005 release date... at least for mass market application.
2006 is a more realistic date for mass production, since not only do they have to develop this technology.. but they have to re-tool existing factories and/or build new production plants. This will take time, and we all know what producing a new chip en masse at the last minuite while cutting corners in the re-tooling department does. (EE, PS2 shortages, major profit losses.. ect..) If you think about it... even IBM\'s Gekko for the NGC is taking about 9 months to a year from completion to be produced for the consumer end product.
Not only that.. but think about it. Who can really afford to develop a game for a machine that\'s 1000x as powerful as the PS2? Right now, it costs millions of dollars just to produce the stuff we\'re seeing now. There\'s going to have to be some MAJOR advances in software to make the process hundreds of times more efficent before we\'ll see games that would even begin to take advantage of all that power.
I just don\'t see that happening in the next 4 years.
