It'll look good on paper, but it'll underperform in the benchmarks. After all, it's always going to give away three points to any serious competition. :-)

TeeCee

(I'd suggest our geographically-challenged visitors stay away from this article's comments area - it's going to get confusing)

It'd be much more use if they went with OpenGL

Its interesting to note that the PS3s graphics oomph is provided by a combination of the Cell CPUs vector and shader processing throughput into a NVIDIA graphics processor, the 'RSX' -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_%27Reality_Synthesizer%27

Quite how the Cell chip on its own handles fast high quality 3D graphics remains to be seen. Its no slouch of course, but how it goes up against custom graphics processing silicon like that of Nvidias own designs (based on around two decades of experience) is questionable - begs the question why Sony didn't just use the Cell chip on its own.

This same BS came up during PS2's time. I've yet to see a working "Emotion Engine" PC card. Just more hype for today's 3rd place contestant.

I'm sorry, but anything with a "Synergistic Processing Element" has to be the work of BOFH or an over eager marketing department....

This has to be the first instance the cell processor is used outside Sony, arguably IBM has offered it on server blades, if I remember correctly, but guess nobody bought'em cause there's 0 noise about that . That's a good thing to see the cell in consumery apps, after all it WAS supposed to be in black goods too .