Sony PS3: Doom & Gloom

Now you're just speculating. I don't see any reason for there not to be any 1080p games available within the next year or two. The original Xbox boasted having HD games and we did see them not long after release.

these PS3's prices on ebay are going to be so over-bloated at launch it is going to be ridiculous.

Well, IBM is shipping the chips to Nintendo so assembly and packaging should only take another week or two. This may be true that Wii is going to ship in a few weeks in Japan.

That's a very wide and very subjective question. Personally, I have front and rear DLP projection, LCD, and CRT in my home. Sony, Mitsubishi, and Hitachi would be a good choice. Other than that, if you plan on buying a blue-ray HDDVD player at some point, go ahead and go 1080p. If that's not on your list, maybe you have or you're looking at non-blue-ray HDDVD, save the money and get a 720p or 1080i.

In the smaller displays, I'd go LCD, for medium (40's) plasma if you've got it, CRT if you don't, in projection (60+) go DLP.

Actually, I saw it as an argument for XBox. Just based on what the OP actually wrote, it seems to imply that even if the first generation PS3 games were 1080p, most gamers wouldn't really see much difference anyways.

iirc, even if a cell burns out, the rest would remain intact and function. they all connect to a central PPE module that dictates where specific instructions go to, which SPE (one of those "cores") will do the work, and which are free to assign other tasks. So if one is dead. it will just skip it and go to the next available core. It should anyway.

As far as the possibility of cores burning out. Its hard to say. this is a new technology, brand new. We dont know for sure if the architecture itself tends to become overheated, if the internal stores (think l1 cache for each of the cores) tend to overheat. Or if the whole process itself will tend to be bottlenecked by some performance problem in the PPE (which is the single most important thing needed to funtcion in a cell chip)

while im sure the developers CAN write code specifically to use a number of cells, im pretty sure they can also just wring code segments that will be queued and run in order of available spe.