Sony has officially unveiled its Playstation 3 console at the 2005 Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Judging by the specifications and tech demos seen at the show, the PS3 looks to be the most powerful of the three competing next generation home consoles.

It uses a 3.2GHz PowerPC-based Cell processor that has a floating point performance of two trillion instructions per second (2 teraflops). In contrast, a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is capable of just 12 billion instructions per second (12 gigaflops).

Visuals come courtesy of a custom-built 256MB Nvidia graphics card (codenamed the Reality Synthesizer) running at 550MHz. Sony claims this offers performance in excess of that provided by two Geforce 6800 Ultra cards running in a Scalable Link Interface configuration.

The rest of the specification is also very impressive. It has dual high definition 1080p video outputs, six USB ports, Bluetooth, and Wifi connectivity for its control pads.

Our only real criticism of the PS3 so far (other than the fact that it'll cost around $500 when released in Q1 2006), is that it bears a startling resemblance to a George Foreman grill, and its control pad looks like a Batarang. Still, at least if you throw it around the room in frustration it'll come back to you unscathed.

Buy the next issue of PCW for more info on PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Revolution.