CES 2006 - Day 3: Playstation 3, Quarter-size Hard Drives, SED and lots of TVs

Playstation 3 at CES

The closest you could get to a Playstation 3 at CES was behind a revolving glass case that showed off the unit in all three colors (silver, white and black).

The design doesn't seem to have changed at all since we first saw it back at E3.

It's not too surprising to see that Sony now explicitly mentions that the controller is a conceptual design only, given the incredible amount of backlash its unveiling generated.

A video very similar to what was played at E3 was running nearby, but nothing in the video particularly caught our eye as something new.

The one demo that was new however was a Blu-ray demonstration using the PS3. The demo was of software decoded Blu-ray playback driven by the PS3's Cell processor. However the content was MPEG-2 encoded and not H.264, which means that the task of decoding is not nearly as CPU intensive as it could be. One thing we have been very curious about is how well the PS3's Cell processor will be able to handle full bitrate H.264 decoding. Without a doubt NVIDIA's RSX GPU will offload some of the decoding, however it remains to be seen if Cell is enough to decode a full 40Mbps Blu-ray stream without dropping frames.

To put things in perspective, NVIDIA told us that with their current H.264 decode acceleration coupled with the fastest CPUs today they can handle around a 25Mbps H.264 stream.