Free Republic

Japanese game giant's expo press conference will now be held before Microsoft's and Nintendo's. Yesterday, Microsoft sent out invitations to its E3 press conference, at which the company confirmed it will show off its next-generation console. As has been the case for the past several years, the event will occur on the evening of the Monday before E3 officially begins on Wednesday. This year, the Microsoft conference will happen at 6:45pm PDT on Monday, May 16. Nintendo's press conference, which will feature its next-gen "Revolution" console, is slated for 9am PDT on Tuesday, May 17, in keeping with tradition. Customarily,...

The swallows come back to San Juan Capistrano every year, the Olympics happen every four years, and old video game consoles get junked every five years. Which means that the game industry is due for a shake-up any quarter now. The current crop of consoles--Sony's PlayStation 2, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube--all have been on the market for about four years. Each manufacturer wants to squeeze as much market life as possible out of the current machines, so they won't spill too many details about future consoles for fear of making the current ones look outdated. But information on next-generation...

Dubbed a "supercomputer on a chip," the Cell microprocessor has until now been long on ambition but short on specifics. At a technical conference in San Francisco, the three electronics giants described a chip that could provide ten times the performance of the latest PC chips and churn through many tasks at once. Aimed squarely at the "digital home" market highly sought-after by Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news), the Cell initiative, which has been in development since 2001, is viewed by some as a formidable, if fledgling, competitor to the world's largest chip maker. While IBM showed off prototypes of...