The Playstation 3 (including the free PS3 you might be able to get your hands on) has a slot-loading 2x speed Blu-ray disc drives. The drive plays games, movies, DVDs, CDs and other type of CD/optical media. The PS3 was originally available with either a 20GB or 60GB hard drive, however an 80GB and 40GB have since been introduced.
At the heart of the Playstation 3 is an IBM-designed Cell microprocessor which runs at 3.2 GHz. It contains one PowerPC-based “Power Processing Element” (PPE) with an additional eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). In fact, only six of the SPEs are actually accessible and usable by game developers, with one of the remaining two reserved for the operating system and the final one meant to improve chip yields.
The other important chip in the system – graphics, is an NVIDIA RSX “Reality Synthesizer”. It has 256 MB of XDR main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX and the maximum resolution is 1080p HD.
Other items of interest in the PS3 are the Bluetooth 2.0, gigabit ethernet port, USB 2.0 and also HDMI v1.3a. Wi-fi networking is also standard on all the models except for the 20GB, and there are also several types of flash card readers on the 60GB and 80GB consoles. The Playstation 3 will support up to 7 controllers, which communicate with the console via Bluetooth.
