Play Sttion Hardware

The PlayStation 3 is convex on its left side when vertical (the top side is convex when horizontal), and has a glossy black finish with the PlayStation logo on the left side.[86] Playstation designer Teiyu Goto stated that the Spider-Man font-inspired logo "was one of the first elements [SCEI president Ken Kutaragi] decided on and the logo may have been the motivating force behind the shape of PS3."[87]

The PlayStation 3 features a slot-loading 2x speed Blu-ray Disc drive for games, Blu-ray movies, DVDs, CDs, and other optical media.[88] It was originally available with hard drives of 20 and 60 GB (only the 60 GB model was available in PAL regions).[17][89] An 80 GB model has since been introduced in NTSC regions,[90] and a 40 GB model has been introduced in all regions.[91][92] All PS3 models have user-upgradeable 2.5" SATA hard drives.[93]

The PlayStation 3 uses the Sony, Toshiba, IBM-designed Cell microprocessor as its CPU, which is made up of one 3.2GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). [94] The eighth SPE is disabled to improve chip yields.[95][96] Only six of the seven SPEs are accessible to developers as the seventh SPE is reserved by the OS.[96] Graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX 'Reality Synthesizer', which can output resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080p HD.[88] The PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of XDR main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.[97]

The system has Bluetooth 2.0, gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and HDMI 1.3a built in on all currently shipping models.[88] Wi-Fi networking is also built-in on the 40, 60 and 80 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.[88][97] The system supports up to 7 controllers that are connected via Bluetooth 2.0 technology.[98]

The PS3's hardware has also been used to build supercomputers for high-performance computing.[99] Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Yellow Dog Linux for the PlayStation 3,[100] and sells PS3s with Linux pre-installed,[101] in single units, and 6 and 32 node clusters.[102] In addition, RapidMind is pushing their stream programming package for the PS3.[103] 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.[104][105][106]

On March 22, 2007, SCE and Stanford University released the Folding@home project for the PlayStation 3.[107] This program allows PS3 owners to lend the computing power of their consoles to help study the physical process of protein folding.