Playstation 3, boom or bust?

Is the glass 1/2 full or 1/2 empty?

Playstation 3 and Sony fan boys hit the highs:

Sony has shipped 2,000,000 PS3 consoles in shortest period of time after launch for any console.

Sony shipped 1,000,000 consoles to US market by end of 2006.

PS3 sales are running at 85% of inventory.

Sales are strong despite a shortage of new games and the fact that many consumers are without TVs that take advantage PS3s spectular images.

On the other hand:

Wii is selling, selling and selling.

Wii is the talk of the playground.

Did I mention that Wii is selling?

And then on the other hand . . .

Any Donkey expects that during the current console generation, millions of Wii buyers will move on to the "hard stuff" and PS3 will be waiting . . .

Read SiliconValley.com article.

IBM to cash in on its chips

While Intel and AMD focused on a perceived need for speed, IBM followed an path of multi-core design and partnerships. IBM chips are in Wii, Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 and it hopes to parley its recent success into billions of dollars over the next decade. Part of IBM's hope hinges on the Cell processor.

"From a technological perspective, we still have a tremendous amount of upside," said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM's systems group. "We've only gone down this road one turn."

IBM is working with other companies, such as Mercury Computing Systems Inc., to adapt Cell and other chips for their own new devices. Cell powers a line of IBM servers and is being used in a supercomputer for the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Toshiba plans to use the chip in TVs.

However, even with Cell's performance boosts, it could have limited paths into other systems unless IBM can encourage many software developers to create applications that take advantage of Cell's unusual architecture.

Read an interesting article about IBM linked here at the Baltimore Sun.