Sony president Ken Kutaragi gave an interesting keynote speech at last week's Tokyo International Digital Conference, in which he spelled out some of his ambitions for the company's Cell technology. According to Gamesindustry.biz, there are plans to shrink the components and develop a Micro Cell, which will be used to power handheld products such as mobile phones - hmm, an entertainment handset with comparable power to PS3? If that doesn't kill off mobile gaming's obsession with retro titles frankly nothing will.
"Kutaragi also talked about the PS3's capability to run games at 120 frames per second," suggests the same article. However, this is slightly more contentious. An interesting post on the Beyond3D.com forum, complete with PowerPoint slides from Kutaragi's presentation, suggests that the 120fps comments were limited to the Cell technology's video/movie performance on forthcoming high definition TVs and didn't directly refer to games. So if you were looking forward to graphics performance possibly above and beyond the human eye's capabilities, you may be disappointed.
Finally, Kutaragi mentioned using multiple Cell chips in futuristic HD displays and home servers thereby allowing users to watch several channels while simultaneously viewing the internet, or to play sports sims alongside viewing real sporting events. There seemed to be much talk about being able to rotate, re-size and re-position different image streams on the screen. I think he's been watching Minority Report a bit too much - or possibly those Dixons adverts that pastiche the Spielberg sci-fi movie. You know, the ones where an attractive Dixons employee answers a customer phone call while standing in front of a translucent display - "you want a laptop computer? That's no problem at all, sir," she says politely as she moves various graphics across the screen.
Yes, that's definitely where he got the idea from.
