Millau Viaduct

The builder claims that the bridge's lifetime will be at least 120 years.
. The project required about 127,000 m³ of concrete, 19,000 metric tons of steel for the reinforced concrete, and 5,000 metric tons of pre-stressed concrete for the cables and shrouds.
. However, if the concession is very profitable, the French government can assume control of the bridge in 2044. This means that the PS3 will not be able to use PS1 and PS2 memory cards; however, the Memory Stick will be able to store save games for both PS1 and PS2 games, unlike the PS2's memory card. The builders, Eiffage, financed the construction in return for a concession to collect the tolls for 75 years, until 2080. [18] Instead it was announced that the PS3 will only use the Sony Memory Stick to save games via MagicGate.

The bridge's construction costs amount to €394 million, with a toll plaza 6 km north of the viaduct costing an additional €20 million. For example, memory cards for PlayStation and PlayStation 2 will not work on the PlayStation 3 hardware. The engineering group Setec has authority in the project, with SNCF engineering having partial control. The PS3 will not be backward-compatible with some of the hardware peripherals of the PS2. The construction consortium is made up of the Eiffage TP company for the concrete part, the Eiffel company for the steel roadway (Gustave Eiffel built the Garabit viaduct in 1884, a train bridge in the neighboring Cantal département), and the Enerpac company for the roadway's hydraulic supports. However, with the powers of [a machine like] the PS3, some parts can be handled by hardware, and some parts by software.". The work leader is the Compagnie Eiffage du Viaduc de Millau, owner of the government contract. There are things that will be required by hardware.

Four consortia were in competition for the building contract:. There are times when games pass through our tests, but are written in ways that make us say, 'What in the world is this code?!' We need to support backward compatibility towards those kinds of games as well, so trying to create compatibility by software alone is difficult. He worked together with the Dutch engineering firm ARCADIS, responsible for the technical design of the bridge. For example, there are cases where their games run, but not according to the console's specifications. The architects of the bridge are the British firm Foster and Partners. "Third-party developers sometimes do things that are unimaginable. The original concept for the bridge was devised by French designer Michel Virlogeux. In a recent interview Ken Kutaragi stated that backward compatibility will be achieved through a combination of hardware and software.

After the choice of the high viaduct's path, five teams of architects and researchers simultaneously worked on a technical solution. Compatibility with PS2 online games and games designed for the hard drive have not been elaborated upon. After long construction studies, the low solution was abandoned because it would have intersected the water table, had negative effects on the town, cost more, and the driving distance would have been longer. It still is not known how Sony has achieved this (although Sony had developed a single-chip PS2 CPU/GPU solution, used in newer revisions of the "slim" PS2). It consisted of two possibilities: the high solution, and the low solution, requiring the construction of a 200 m bridge to cross the Tarn, then a viaduct of 2300 m extended by a tunnel on the Larzac side. The PlayStation 3 will be compatible "on the chip" with PlayStation 2 and PlayStation games, without emulation. The fourth option was selected by the government on June 28, 1989. [17].

In initial studies, four options were examined:. The Blu-Ray region code will be different from DVD region code. The viaduct was officially inaugurated by President Chirac on December 14, 2004 to open for traffic on December 16, several weeks ahead of the revised schedule. Blu-Ray movies played on the PS3 will use a region code. A revised schedule aimed for the bridge to be opened in January 2005. Sony's decision to stop region coding means consumers will be able to purchase PS3 games from anywhere in the world, which may turn out to be significantly cheaper than purchasing them exclusively from their home territory, or importing the system from Japan on launch. Construction began on October 10, 2001 and was intended to take 3 years, but weather conditions put work on the bridge behind schedule. According to Ephraim, “If you look at the fact that [the PlayStation 3] will support high-definition TV, which will be a global standard, there’s a good likelihood that it will be global region, as for example we’ve done with the PSP [PlayStation Portable].”.

The Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, United States has a deck considerably higher than either, at 321 m (1,053 ft) above the Arkansas River. The PS3’s support for HDTV standards was cited as one of the key reasons the company has stopped the practice of region coding. Its deck, at "almost 270 m" (886 ft) above the Tarn, is apparently slightly higher than the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia in the United States, which is 267 m (876 ft) above the New River. Unlike its predecessors, the PlayStation and the PlayStation 2, the PS3 is tipped to allow gaming and movie playback from downloads or discs bought in any part of the world, rather than being limited to playing discs only from a specific region. The Millau Viaduct is the second highest vehicular bridge measured from the roadway elevation. PlayStation 3 games are unlikely to be region coded, according to Sony’s Australian managing director, Michael Ephraim. Current plans call for towers 382.6 m high. [16].

The proposed Strait of Messina Bridge in Italy, if constructed would be taller still and would also be the world's largest suspension bridge. However, the March 2006 issue of PSM magazine reports that Sony intends to launch an online service with the PS3 designed to compete with Microsoft's Xbox Live. The viaduct is the tallest vehicular bridge in the world, nearly twice as tall as the previous tallest vehicular bridge in Europe, the Europabrücke in Austria. It also means that there will be different user interfaces for each game depending on the developer. The piers were assembled first, together with some temporary supports, before the decks were slid out across the piers by satellite-guided hydraulic rams that moved the deck 600 mm (23.6 inches) every 4 minutes. While this will give games publishers greater freedom in terms of what they are able to offer online, some say it may make it more difficult for Sony to control the quality of the online experience. The piers each support 97 m (319 ft) tall pylons. Instead, online services for PS3 games will be decentralized and left up to individual game publishers.

These sections were assembled on site from pieces of 60 metric tons, 4 m (13 ft) wide and 17 m (56 ft) long, made in factories in Lauterbourg and Fos-sur-Mer by Eiffage. In an issue of the Official PlayStation Magazine, Sony denied rumors that it would be implementing a centralized online service similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Each pier is composed of 16 framework sections, each section weighing 2,230 metric tons. Sony has stated that the online service for the PlayStation 3 will use the same non-unified architecture as that of the PlayStation 2. The piers range in height from 77–246 m (253–807 ft), and taper in their longitudinal section from 24.5 m (81 ft) at the base to 11 m (36 ft) at the deck. The games are as follows: Fatal Inertia(Koei), Mahjong Taikai(Koei), Ni-Oh(Koei), Shin Ten Makai VI(Idea Factory) Vampire's Rain(AQ Interactive), Sonic the Hedgehog(Sega), Unnamed RPG(Success), Hitsuji Mura(Success). It carries two lanes of traffic in each direction. But as always, this could be subject to change (although anymore being added on is hopeful at best).

The roadway has a slope of 3% descending from south to north, and curves in plan section on a 20 km (12.4 mile) radius to give drivers better visibility. Unfortunately, the total is 8. The six central spans each measure 342 m (1,122 ft) with the two outer spans measuring 204 m (670 ft). In a recent issue of Famitsu (Date of edit 29/01/06), A list of available games for the PS3 for 2006 have been released. The roadway weighs 36,000 metric tons and is 2,460 m (8,071 ft) long, measuring 32 m (105 ft) wide by 4.2 m (13.8 ft) deep. Sony is providing developers with Linux toolchains where SN Systems will provide more customer-oriented Linux tools at an additional cost. The Millau Viaduct consists of an eight-span steel roadway supported by seven concrete piers. In addition, Sony recently purchased SN Systems, a former provider of Microsoft Windows based development tools for a variety of console platforms including the PlayStation 2, GameCube, PSP and Nintendo DS to create additional Linux development tools.

The bridge was constructed by the Eiffage group, which also built the Eiffel Tower, under a government contract which allows the company to collect tolls for up to 75 years. The list of standards they are reported to be considering includes:. The Eiffage group operates the viaduct as a toll bridge, with the toll currently set at €4.90 for light automobiles (€6.50 during the peak months of July and August). Sublicensed technologies includes:. Many tourists heading to southern France and Spain follow this route because it is direct and without tolls for the 340 km between Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers, except for the bridge itself. The list of open standards includes:. The purpose of the A75 is to increase the speed and reduce the cost of vehicle traffic travelling along this route. The PlayStation 3, unlike the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 systems, is based on publicly-available application programming interfaces.

The bridge forms the last link of the A75 (la Méridienne) autoroute, providing a continuous high-speed route south from Paris through Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers. Sony has selected several technologies and arranged several sublicensing agreements to create the software development kit for developers. The bridge now traverses the Tarn valley above its lowest point, linking the causse du Larzac to the causse rouge, and is inside the perimeter of the Grands Causses regional natural park. However, Epic stated in response that they are working to release the PC version first and that the PS3 version has no priority for release over the PC version. Before the bridge was constructed, traffic had to descend into the Tarn River valley and pass along the route nationale N9 near the town of Millau, causing heavy congestion at the beginning and end of the July and August vacation season. In the January issue of the same publication, it was stated that Epic Games is working hard to get Unreal Tournament 2007 ready for the proposed launch in Spring 2006. . In the November issue of PSM Magazine, SCEA Chief Operating Officer Jack Tretton mentioned both Lair and Warhawk as launch titles, although Sony would not expand further on his comments.

. At this time, only three games have been mentioned as PS3 launch titles: Lair from Factor 5, Warhawk from Incognito Entertainment, and Unreal Tournament 2007 from Epic Games. It was formally opened on 14 December 2004 and opened to traffic on 16 December 2004. One of the most, if not the most anticipated PS3 game up to this point is Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which had its first trailer shown at the Tokyo Game Show 2005 event. Designed by British architect Lord Foster in collaboration with French bridge engineer Michel Virlogeux, it is the tallest vehicular bridge in the world, with one pier's summit at 341 metres (1,118 ft)—slightly higher than the Eiffel Tower and only 40 m (132 ft) shorter than the Empire State Building. Controversial games developers Rockstar North have also hinted that they are planning the provisionally named Grand Theft Auto 4, primarily for the PS3. The Millau Viaduct (French: le Viaduc de Millau) is a cable-stayed road bridge that spans the valley of the River Tarn near Millau in southern France. Since they aren't working on a remake then this will most likely be Final Fantasy XIII.

[1]. Square Enix is however listed for a Final Fantasy game along with 70 other Japanese developers during TGS 2005. Felix Baumgartner became the first person to BASE jump from the bridge on 27 June 2004, shortly after the road deck was completed but well before the bridge was opened. Also shown at E3 was a video of Final Fantasy VII 's opening sequence remade in PlayStation 3 graphics, at the time recent to the show, Square Enix stated no plans for a remake. 2080: Eiffage toll concession runs out. In the E3 2005 Press Conference, Sony showed some pre-rendered and some real-time videos of games in development with the codenames Eyedentify, Vision Gran Turismo and MotorStorm. 2044: French government can assume control of the bridge if the toll concession is very profitable. Some anticipated ones include Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Killzone PS3, Resident Evil 5, Devil May Cry 4, Shin Megami Tensei, Armored Core 4 , Unreal Tournament 2007 and Tekken 6.

January 10, 2005: initial planned opening date. Most developers have already announced games for the PS3. December 16, 2004: opening of the viaduct, ahead of schedule. The actual number in development, though undeniably fewer, should still be very high. December 14, 2004: official inauguration. As of October 2005, there are already over 150 PS3 games announced by multiple developers and publishers, like SCEA, Electronic Arts, Konami, Namco, Capcom, Square Enix and many others. 2nd half of 2004: installation of the pylons and shrouds, removal of the temporary roadway supports. According to DevStation Conference, the PS3 will use the Cross Media Bar already used in the PlayStation Portable and PSX devices.

May 28, 2004: the pieces of roadway are several centimeters apart, their juncture to be accomplished within two weeks. Sony has appealed this decision and will be able to sell its products while the case is under appeal. November 2003: completion of the last piers (Piers P2 at 221 m and P3 at 245 m are the highest piers in the world.). Sony lost, and has been required to pay considerable royalties to Immersion and suspend the sale of the controllers, including all PlayStation and PlayStation 2 console packages containing them. February 25–February 26, 2003: laying of first pieces of roadway. While Microsoft settled out of court, Sony continued to defend the case. November 2002: first piers complete. In March 2005, Sony and Microsoft were sued by force-feedback company Immersion for patent infringement for the use of vibration functions in their controllers.

September 2002: assembly of roadway begins. Also possibly complicating the controller design is Sony's ongoing legal battle with Immersion Corporation of San Jose. August 2002: start of work on pier support C0. Their downplays concerning a rumor suggesting Sony would unveil a revamped PS3 controller at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2006 were sound, as the controller was not shown in any form during the event. July 2002: start of work on the foundations of temporary, height adjustable roadway supports. Though Sony itself had previously admitted at this past E3 that the controller design for their PlayStation 3 console was not finalized, GameSpot believes any purported changes will not be substantial. June 2002: support C8 completed, start of work on piers. The PS3's specifications, and E3 display units, don't support DualShock controller ports.

March 2002: start of work on the pier support C8. The number of ports to support such backward compatibility would most likely be limited to one, although this is also an unconfirmed rumour. January 2002: laying pier foundations. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the PS3 may in fact support the older DualShock 2 controllers, however, this is thought to be true due to the PlayStation 3 striving to attain backwards compatibility. December 14, 2001: laying of the first stone. [12]. October 16, 2001: work begins. Some people pointed that the controller bears a similar resemblance to the old Alps Interactive 3rd party controller which was originally made for the PlayStation.

1998: decision to contract out both construction costs and future tolls to a private enterprise. ^[11] In an interview with Edge, SCEE's Chris Deering echoed these statements by describing the E3 controller as "just a design study". July 9, 1996: choice of the cable-stayed bridge type. According to the Japanese video game publication Famitsu, Sony Computer Entertainment chief technical officer Masayuki Chatani said that the controller design is a "prototype, so there could be some small adjustments.". term). However, some suggest that the controller, while a little un-traditional in contrast to the DualShock and DualShock 2 controllers, might provide adequate comfort for extended hours of play. January 10, 1995: declaration of utilité publique (public usefulness), as needed to apply eminent domain(U.S. The design of the controller has been likened to a boomerang or a banana by many observers (or even less flattering likenesses).

October 19, 1991: selection of the high solution, with the viaduct at 2500 m. SCEI's press release indicates that controller connectivity to the PlayStation 3 can be provided via:. June 28, 1989: governmental approval of the middle route. Finally, whether the PS3's advantage in floating-point performance will be readily apparent in games depends entirely on whether developers are able to effectively make use of the system's unique architecture. €4.90–6.50: typical automobile toll, as of 2005. Floating point calculations are very important for graphics, multimedia, and game physics, but considerably less important for other tasks like artificial intelligence. 10,000–25,000 vehicles: estimated daily traffic. It should also be noted that floating-point performance is a single-dimensional metric for comparing computers, and that many other considerations (including integer performance, memory size and bandwidth, etc.) determine the "overall" performance of a computer system.

290,000 metric tons: total weight of the bridge. The floating-point capacity of the PS3 will significantly exceed that of the XBox 360, although it should be noted that Microsoft's console, due to its 3 symmetric fully featured processor cores (which are very similar to the Cell's PPE), may fare better on dynamically branching code, like that used for artificial intelligence. 85,000 m³: total volume of concrete used. It should be noted that this figure is an estimate based on ideal, 100% efficient operation of the processor. 32.05 m: width of the roadway. The seven SPEs in the PS3, in addition to the VMX unit in the PPE, would yield a total combined single-precision floating point performance of 218 GFLOPS (the same figure quoted by Sony). 4.20 m: thickness of the roadway. According to an in-depth report compiled by IBM, the theoretical peak performance of a single SPE is 25.6 GFLOPS.

270 m: average height of the roadway. Additionally, programmers may find it difficult, initially, to optimize their game engines to make the best use of the highly parallel architectures of both systems, further reducing real-world performance. 154: number of shrouds. Inevitably, real-world performance for both systems will be lower. 87 m: height of a pylon. The performance statistics given for the PS3 and XBox 360 in Sony's presentation were based on the theoretical maximum performance of the systems. 336 m: height of Pier 2, the tallest (245 m at the roadway's level). It was unclear how these numbers were exactly calculated, possibly based on addition of the floating point capabilities of the processing units in the Cell CPU and those of the RSX GPU.

77 m: height of Pier 7, the shortest. The figures are likely rounded estimations. 7: number of piers. In their official press release, the same statistic regarding the PS3 as a whole was reported to be over 2.1 TFLOPS. 2,460 metre: total length of the roadway. The presentation shows that one PS3 Cell CPU alone is capable of 218 GFLOPS, compared to the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU's 115 GFLOPS. the successful bidders, lead by the Eiffage group, product of the Fougerolles-SEA fusion, the third largest French group in public works, and the sixth largest in Europe. In a slide show at their E3 conference, Sony presented the "CPU floating point capability" of the PlayStation 3's Cell CPU, and compared it to other CPUs.

one led by Générale Routière, with Via GTI (French), and Cintra, Necso, Acciona, and Ferrovial Agroman (all Spanish). This gives the RSX an effective 48GB/s when sending data to/from GPU and RAM. Société du viaduc de Millau, made up of ASF, Egis, GTM, Bouygues Travaux Publics, SGE, CDC Projets, Tofinso (all French) and Autostrade (Italian); and. Since the RSX is connected to the XDR DRAM and GDDR3 RAM similar to a Turbo Cached GPU it can access both memory locations at the exact same time. one led by Dragados (Spanish), with Skanska (Swedish) and Bec (French);. Nvidia 7800 GTX 512 MB was released a couple of months after this statement so it's believed to be a comparison between the RSX and the 7800 GTX 256 MB not the 7800 GTX 512 MB which is 30% faster. traverse the middle of the valley. An Nvidia spokesperson was quoted in "Playstation Magazine" that the RSX shares a lot of inner workings with Nvidia 7800 which is based on G70 architecture.

follow the path of Route Nationale 9, providing good access to Millau but at the cost of technical difficulties and intrusion on the town; and. Clockspeed does not however indicate the performance of the GPU as ATI X1800 is also 20% faster than Nvidia 7800 but has similiar game performance. bypass Millau to the west (12 km longer), requiring four bridges;. This places the clockspeed for both the 7800 GTX 512 and the RSX at approximately 28% faster than the 256 MB 7800 GTX. bypass Millau to the east, requiring two large bridges over the Tarn and the Dourbie;. Since the G70 is also capable of carrying out 136 shader operations per clock, the RSX is expected to feature the same number of parallel pixel and vertex shader pipelines as the G70 (NVidia's top-of-the-line GeForce 7800 GTX 512 currently contains 24 pixel and 8 vertex pipelines), and clocked similarly to Nvidia's highest end PC GPU based on G70 (with speculation that the RSX chip will be reworked using the new G71 architecture topping 650-700 MHz) (again, the 7800 GTX 512 is clocked at 550 MHz, which is equivalent to the 550 MHz announced for the RSX). Nvidia has stated that the RSX will have a lot in common with the G70 architecture used in NVidia's GeForce 7 Series GPUs which were introduced in June of 2005.

NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated during Sony's pre-show press conference at E3 2005 that the RSX will be more powerful than two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards combined. Custom "RSX" or "Reality Synthesizer" design co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony:. The 8th SPE is there for redundancy: if one of the other 7 are defective the 8th SPE will activate and stand in for the defective part. Only 7, however, are active.

3.2 GHz Cell processor with 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). ^[8]. According to a press release by Sony at the May 16, 2005 E3 Conference, the specifications of the PlayStation 3 are as follows. Please see the section entitled overall floating-point capability for more details on this.

Real-world performance for both systems will naturally be less, and the specifications of the PS3 may undergo major changes before the system is launched. These comparisons are based on estimates of theoretical maximum performance. The amount of completely programmable floating point capacity afforded by the Cell microprocessor is higher than the Xbox 360's CPU, while the floating-point performance of the two systems' GPUs, which are designed specifically for graphics rendering tasks, are somewhat closer to parity. This comparison is based on the theoretical combined floating point capacity of the Cell microprocessor and the RSX GPU in the PS3 compared to the combined capacity of the Xenon CPU and Xenos GPU in the Xbox 360.

A simple comparison of the system architectures appears to indicate that the floating point capability of the PS3 is estimated to be greater than that of the Xbox 360. The current nature of pricing in the video game industry is to sell the hardware at a loss, at least initially, and then recoup the losses from game sales and developer licensing. Although manufacturing costs for Blu-Ray and the cell are unknown, it is safe to say like most new systems, they will lose money from the first year. This means that buyers should be able to purchase a PlayStation 3 at a lower price than its actual manufacturing cost.

$494) to make, not including labor, and they expect Sony to sell the Playstation 3 for less than its manufacturing cost. Merrill Lynch Japan estimates the PS3 manufacturing costs at 54,000 yen (U.S. An Inquirer article details internal Sony development: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28879. It is likely that standalone players will be released prior to PS3.

Sony Blu-Ray standalone players are to be released early summer^[7]. Sony office press releases indicate a 2006^[6] launch. 12,500 for the Super Famicom). In the same magazine, Ken Kutaragi was interviewed, and expressed little concern over the PS3's possibly high launch price, believing that customers would be willing to pay extra for a superior product, as they had in the past for the original PlayStation (¥39,800 vs.

In contrast Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, says the PS3 will not be expensive and that it will be competitively priced against the Xbox 360.^[5]. So we're going to have to do our best [in containing the price]". "But we're aiming for consumers throughout the world. I think everyone can still buy it if they wanted to," said Kutaragi to a mostly Japanese crowd.

The system's retail price is not known.^[3][4] Sony Computer Entertainment president and "father of the PlayStation" Ken Kutaragi points out "It'll be expensive" and "I'm aware that with all these technologies, the PS3 can't be offered at a price that's targeted towards households. A functional version of the console was not at E3 or the Tokyo Game Show in September 2005, although some demonstrations were held on devkits and videos of soon-to-be released games created to run on systems with the same specs as the PS3 were presented, such as Metal Gear Solid 4 and Killzone 3. The PS3 was officially unveiled on May 16, 2005 by Sony during the E3 conference, where the console was first shown to the public. .

At the moment, little more is known in public about the PS3 apart from its hardware specifications and reports that it will be based on open APIs for game development. Sony has announced that the PS3 will be backward compatible with earlier PS1 and PS2 games. Specifically, Sony representatives have informed video game store clerks to expect a North American shipment in Summer 2006, more narrowly defined as "somewhere between June and September." It is the successor to the PlayStation 2 and will mainly compete against the Nintendo Revolution and Xbox 360. The PlayStation 3 is slated for release this year^[2].

The PlayStation 3 (PS3) (Japanese: プレイステーション3) is Sony's Seventh generation era video game console in the market-leading PlayStation series. ^[15]. IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol. Kynogon's Kynapse 4.0 (PDF) "large scale A.I.".

that aims to produce high-quality virtual foliage in real time. SpeedTree RT, a programming package produced by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. Cg, Nvidia's C-like shading language. Alias Systems Corporation's 3D graphics programs [14].

Pixelux's Game Asset Synthesis Technology [13], a toolkit for advanced procedural synthesis. Havok's physics and animation engines. Epic's Unreal engine 3.0 framework. Ageia's PhysX SDK, NovodeX.

OpenVG, for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. OpenMAX, a collection of fast, cross-platform tools for general "media acceleration," such as matrix calculations. OpenGL ES 2.0, the embedded version of the popular OpenGL graphics API. COLLADA, an open, XML-based file format for 3D models.

The Ability to Have 7 Controllers at Once. Parental Controls. Hub/Home Ethernet Gaming Network. Simultaneous World Wide Web access and gameplay.

MP3 and ATRAC download and playback. Digital photograph display (JPEG). EyeToy virtual object manipulation. EyeToy voice command recognition.

EyeToy interactive reality game. High-definition IP video conferencing. Two simultaneous High-definition television streams for use on a title screen for a HD Blu-ray Movie. The ability for the PlayStation Portable to connect to the PlayStation 3 as a video-enabled controller.

Bluetooth 2.0 (up to 7 controllers). USB 2.0 (wired). TCP/IP networking (wired ethernet). Integrated for mesh networking and connectivity with the PlayStation Portable.

802.11g Wi-Fi. USB 2.0 (four front and two rear ports). Bluetooth 2.0. IEEE 802.11g Wi-Fi.

Three Gigabit Ethernet ports (Sony has indicated that because of cost reduction there is a possibility that the PlayStation 3 may act only as an accessory interface and hub and perhaps not as a router, as originally planned.)^[10]. 32 cm (L) x 24 cm (W) x 8 cm (H)^[9]. SD/MMC slot. CompactFlash Type I and II slot.

Memory Stick standard/Duo and standard/mini slots. Optional but not required for most games. Detachable 2.5" hard drive with Linux pre-installed. CD: PlayStation CD-ROM, PlayStation 2 CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-DA (ROM), CD-R, CD-RW, SACD, SACD Hybrid (CD layer) SACD HD.

DVD: PlayStation 2 DVD-ROM, PlayStation 3 DVD-ROM, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW. Blu-ray Disc: PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, BD-Video, BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE, BD-RW. Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS, LPCM (DSP functionality handled by the Cell processor). Multiple analog outputs (Composite, S-Video, Component video).

S/PDIF optical output for digital audio. Two HDMI (Type A) outputs (Dual-screen HD outputs). Supported screen sizes: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p. 76.8 GB/s Cell FlexIO Bus (44.8 GB/s outbound, 32 GB/s inbound).

204.8 GB/s Cell EIB. 5 GB/s System Bus (Aggregated 2.5 GB/s upstream and downstream). 35 GB/s GPU to CPU (Aggregated 20 GB/s (write), 15 GB/s (read)). 22.4 GB/s GPU to GDDR-3 VRAM: 128 bits × 700 MHz × 2 accesses per clock cycle (one per edge).

25.6 GB/s GPU to XDR DRAM: 64 bits × 3.2 GHz. 256 MB GDDR3 VRAM clocked at 700 MHz. 256 MB Rambus XDR DRAM clocked at CPU die speed (3.2 GHz). 128-bit pixel precision offers rendering of scenes with high dynamic range imaging.

33 billion dot products per second (51 billion dot products with CPU). 74.8 billion shader operations per second (100 billion with CPU). 136 shader operations per clock. Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines.

Full high definition output (up to 1080p) x 2 channels. 1.8 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second). Clocked at 550 MHz.