Nintendo provided details Tuesday (May 17) of its next-generation game system as well as announcing its smallest ever portable player, the Game Boy Micro.

All three leading console makers agree they will embrace the Internet and Wi-Fi to expand their markets, but each is taking a unique path.

The Playstation 3 will deliver nearly 2 teraflops overall performance, said Ken Kutaragi, president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, at a presentation at the E3 game conference. The performance comes from the 3.2-GHz multicore Cell processor co-designed with IBM and Toshiba and the 550-MHz RSX graphics chip developed with Nvidia Corp.

The resulting system will feature twice the floating-point performance of the Xbox 360 launched late last week. The Playstation 3 has 256-Mbytes of Rambus XDR main memory that will support three times the memory bandwidth of today's PCs, Kutaragi added.

The RSX graphics chip will support two simultaneous 2-megapixel displays at resolutions of up to 1,080-lines interlaced. It has its own bank of 256-Mbytes of GDDR3 graphics memory.

Sony's performance edge and accelerated schedule may help the top console maker forestall big market gains by No. 2 Microsoft, which will launch its Xbox 360 about six months ahead of the Playstation 3. Previously, observers expected the Playstation 3 would not arrive until the fall of 2006.

All console makers are seeing wireless and Internet communications as a way to reach out beyond the demographics of the 18 to 24 male. Both Microsoft and Sony will support text, voice and video messaging and chat on their new systems as well as online sites for buying game-related products and services.

"The network is the core element of the PS3. Every aspect of the system is designed around broadband and home networks for a system that is always on and always connected," said Masa Chatani, chief technology officer of Sony Computer Entertainment.

The Playstation 3 will support dual Gigabit Ethernet connections, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth links for up to seven simultaneous controllers, Chatani said. Wi-Fi support will allow Playstation Portable devices act as remote displays to the console.

To date, online gaming has been slow to take off. Less than ten percent of today's more than 20 million Xbox user subscribe to Microsoft's online gaming environment, an option on the current system. Microsoft will build online gaming capabilities as standard features into the Xbox 360 in hopes half of the systems users will become online gamers.

Microsoft will offer an online arcade site to attract new and casual gamers as well as a marketplace where users can create and sell their own stickers and T-shirts. J Allard, a principal X Box developer, said the company aims to attract 1 billion game players in what he called the new HD Era the next-generation consoles will create.