PS3 launches in March 2006........................not in the US, but in Japan. US should get it in November 2006, around that time. Same time when Microsoft release the all new Windows Vista. Estimated price for PS3 is between $300-$400. It has to maintain competitiveness with the XBox 360.
PS3 offer Blu-Ray technology which is a new video standard to watching movies and such. Probably a proprietary technology, but it's Sony. They're always coming out with something like that. Overall, it's a more powerful gaming system compared to the PS2 with the "Cell" powering it.
PS2 specs:
CPU:
Emotion Engine
System Clock: 294.912 MHz
Bus Width: 128 bit
Cache: 16 kb
System Memory: 32 MB Direct Rambus
Memory Bus Bandwidth: 3.2 GB per second
Co-Processor: FPU (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 1, Floating Point Divider x 1)
Vector Units: VU0 and VU1 (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 9, Floating Point Divider x 1)
Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
3D CG Geometric Transformation: 66 million Polygons Per Second
Compressed Image Decoder: MPEG2
GFX:
Clock Frequency: 150MHz
DRAM Bus bandwidth: 48 GB Per Second
DRAM Bus width: 256 bits
Pixel Configuration: RGB:Alpha:Z Buffer (24:8:32)
Maximum Polygon Rate: 75 Million Polygons Per Second
Memory: 4 MB VRAM
Sound:
SPU2+CPU
Number of voices: ADPCM: 48 channel on SPU2 plus definable by software
Sampling Frequency: 44.1 KHz or 48 KHz (selectable)
Memory: 2 MB
I/O Processor
CPU Core: Current PlayStation CPU
Clock Frequency: 33.8688 MHz or 36.864 MHz (selectable)
Sub Bus: 32 Bit
Interface Types: FireWire/i-Link IEEE1394, Universal Serial Bus (USB)
Communication via PC-Card PCMCIA Type III
Drive
DVD-ROM 4x (24x CDROM)
PS3 specs:
Cell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS
GPU:
RSX @550MHz
1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines
Sound:
Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell- base processing)
Memory:
256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz
System Bandwidth
Main RAM 25.6GB/s
VRAM 22.4GB/s
RSX 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s (read)
SB< 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)