Major features of the console include its unified online gaming service, the PlayStation Network, its robust multimedia capabilities, connectivity with the PlayStation Portable,
online gaming service, the PlayStation Network, its robust multimedia capabilities, connectivity with the PlayStation Portable, and its use of the
The PlayStation 3 features a slot-loading 2x speed Blu-ray Disc drive for games, Blu-ray movies, DVDs, CDs and other optical media. It was originally available with hard drives of 20 and 60 GB (20 GB model was not available in PAL regions) but various sizes up to 320 GB have been made available since then models have user-upgradeable 2.5" SATA hard drives.
The PlayStation 3 uses the Sony, Toshiba, IBM-designed Cell microprocessor as its CPU, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The eighth SPE is disabled to improve chip yields. Only six of the seven SPEs are accessible to developers as the seventh SPE is reserved by the console's operating system. Graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', which can output resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080p HD. The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.
The system has Bluetooth 2.0 (with support for up to 7 bluetooth devices), gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and HDMI 1.4[cn 1] built in on all currently shipping models. Wi-Fi networking is also built-in on all but the 20 GB models, while a flash card reader (compatible with Memory Stick, SD/MMC and CompactFlash/Microdrive media) is built-in on 60 GB and CECHExx 80 GB models.
The PS3's hardware has also been used to build supercomputers for high-performance computing. Fixstars Solutions sell a version of Yellow Dog Linux for the PlayStation 3 (originally sold by Terra Soft Solutions). RapidMind produced a stream programming package for the PS3, but were acquired by Intel in 2009. Also, on January 3, 2007, Dr. Frank Mueller, Associate Professor of Computer science at NCSU, clustered 8 PS3s. Mueller commented that the 256 MB of system RAM is a limitation for this particular application and is considering attempting to retrofit more RAM. Software includes: Fedora Core 5 Linux ppc64, MPICH2, OpenMP v 2.5, GNU Compiler Collection and CellSDK 1.1. As a more cost-effective alternative to conventional supercomputers, the U.S. military has purchased clusters of PS3 units for research purposes. Retail PS3 Slim units cannot be used for supercomputing, because the PS3 Slim lacks the ability to boot into a third-party OS.
On March 22, 2007, SCE and Stanford University released the Folding@home project for the PlayStation 3.[61] This program allows PS3 owners to lend the computing power of their consoles to help study the physical process of protein folding.
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