Photo: GREGG SEGAL

UP ALL NIGHT: Insomniac Games hopes it has created an addictive addition to PlayStation 3’s launch lineup. [Clockwise from top] P.J. McNerny, Alex Hastings, Ted Price, and Eric Ellis.

Last month saw the introduction of the PlayStation 3, Sony’s first new game console in five years. Loaded with new hardware, including a Blu-ray optical disc player, a blazing-fast graphics card, and the nine-core Cell microprocessor, the PS3 has the horsepower to run the most complex and photo-realistic console games ever conceived. But despite all the careful engineering that goes into the hardware of a new game ­console, its fate really rests on whether the games it runs can draw an audience. To a great degree, maintaining Sony’s top spot in the US $30 billion game industry rests with a small company called Insomniac Games, a star among the groups that have churned out a game in time for the launch of the PS3.

When IEEE Spectrum visited Insomniac’s Burbank, Calif., headquarters, it was a stellar blue day in July, but the creators of the best-selling atchet & Clank franchise were thrilled to be inside and hard at work on Resistance: Fall of Man. As the Insomniacs worked, Sony clung to its position ahead of both Microsoft and third-place Nintendo Co., which was to release its new Wii system within days of the PS3 launch. Sony’s original plan was to beat Nintendo to market by several months, but the PS3 launch has been plagued by delays, the most recent due to problems with the Blu-ray optical disc drive. This past September, Sony unveiled scaled-down plans to dole out only 2 million units in the United States and Japan by Christmas, down from an expected 4 million. The company also said it would not have enough stock to roll out the PS3 in Europe until March.

Despite the delays, there’s something inside the PS3 that burnished Sony’s reputation as a hardware company. The heart of the machine is the powerful new Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor. Developed over the last five years by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba on a reported budget of $400 million, the Cell is not just another chip: it is a giant leap beyond the current generation of computer processors into a next‑gen muscle machine optimized for multimedia tasks. Packing nine processors onto a single chip, the Cell can do up to 192 billion floating-point operations per second, a 36‑fold increase over the chip that drove the PlayStation 2 to the top of the gaming world [see “Multimedia Monster,” IEEE Spectrum, January 2006].

The potential payoff for all three companies goes beyond gaming, of course. Toshiba plans to incorporate the Cell in its high-definition televisions. IBM and Mercury Computer Systems, in Chelmsford, Mass., are making Cell blade servers. And Sony might try to capture control of the living room via its Cell-­powered gaming console.

“Sony may have the vision that its box will morph into something more like a media center,” says analyst Michael Pachter of Los Angeles–based Wedbush Morgan Securities. But that won’t happen if people don’t buy the console, and they won’t do that unless the games are the best they’ve ever experienced.

That experience won’t come cheap. At press time, the expected retail price in the United States was a whopping $499 for a console with a 20-gigabyte hard drive and $599 for one with a 60-GB drive. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 debuted last year for $399, and Nintendo’s Wii is expected to come in at about $250. “The pressure’s on Sony, because they have to justify the cost for this monster in an expensive box,” says Michael Wolf, director of the New York City–based digital home group of ABI Research, a market research firm.

As some of the people responsible for justifying the cost, the Insomniacs were feeling the heat, too, back on that July day. At that point they had been cranking out code for the Cell for roughly six months, trying to produce an addictive, eye-popping game that would demonstrate the power of the new processor.

To pull this off, they had to learn to squeeze as many calculations per second as they could out of an unfamiliar chip. The Cell is capable of number crunching that would choke other top-of-the-line processors, but only because its architecture is like nothing game developers have ever seen. Each chip contains a single processor that coordinates the work of eight others. And each of those eight differs greatly from the kind of processor you’d find in a PC or game console today. The Cell lets the programmer ask many things of it at once, but it requires those tasks to be molded to the particular abilities of the eight specialized processors. That means programmers will have to learn new ways to code games. It could be that programming the Cell is the most challenging game that developers have ever played, with one big difference: the fate of one of Sony’s most important products hangs in the balance.