The PlayStation 3 was first officially announced May 16, 2005, at a press conference prior to the 11th annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. The design of the machine incorporates many successful standards established by the original PlayStation and the PlayStation 2 -- both of which led the console markets throughout their respective generations -- but it also offers some new features that distinguish it from its predecessors as well as its competition.

Fittingly, the central feature of the PS3 is its CPU, the Cell processor, which was co-developed by IBM, Toshiba, and Sony. The PS3's Cell processor uses seven "Synergistic Processing Elements" (SPEs) plus an eighth for "redundancy," and is designed to dynamically handle multiple operations. Graphics are produced through the RSX GPU, which was co-developed with Nvidia. The console has 256MB of XDR RAM for use by the CPU, and another 256MB of GDDR3 VRAM for use by the graphics chip.