Sony Says PS3 Shortages Will End by May

By Geoff Duncan February 28, 2007

In comments to Reuters, Jack Tretton, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, maintains that his company is on track to ship two million PlayStation 3 systems to North America by the end of March, 2007. Tretton further asserts that shortages of the company’s latest gaming console should be completely over by May.

According to Tretton, Sony’s high-end gaming console is still out of stock in some markets, despite having been released in the U.S. back in November 2006. Although the consoles saw strong interest when they were introduced and supply limitations made them almost impossible to obtain, anecdotal evidence suggests PlayStation 3 systems are widely and easily available at retailers today. Tretton maintains full shelves are the goal: “Our goal is to fill shelves across the United States. Our goal is not to have empty shelves, it’s to have full shelves. If we have empty shelves, that’s one less consumer who could have bought a PlayStation 3.”

Sony’s PlayStation 3 is the most expensive mainstream gaming console to hit the market—systems retail for $500 and $600, with the more expensive system offering more hard drive capacity and built-in Wi-Fi. The PlayStation 3 is also central to Sony’s hopes for its Blu-ray next-generation disc format: every PS3 comes with a Blu-ray drive, and Sony is already claiming victory over rival format HD DVD based in part on sales of PS3 systems. However, recent figures have Sony’s PlayStation 3 lagging in sales, bringing up the rear behind the NIntendo Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the company’s own earlier PlayStation 2 system.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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A stack of PS3 games.

PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
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CELL it
The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn't much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony's latest system, with a couple of exceptions. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail.

"The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance," Whatcookie explains. "The CELL even surpasses the PS4's CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance."
The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360. This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called "unfriendly to emulation," where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU.
"This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU's memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen," Whatcookie says. "This type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
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"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…

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PlayStation 5 with its controller.

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