Final PS3 more powerful than E3 demo?

Back at Sony's PlayStation 3 presentation at E3, the company and its publishers showed off a number of demos and presentations, some of which were running in real time on a developer's prototype machine. Naturally, one of the questions that was raised by the audience was whether the actual console--which hits stores in spring 2006--would be able to run its games with as much graphical integrity. The answer is yes, according to Web site ITmedia, which reports that the finalized PS3 will be exceedingly more powerful than its current developer's machine.

[UPDATE] ITmedia revealed that the Cell chip used in Sony's PS3 developer's kit is running at only 2.4GHz, just 75 percent of the machine's final spec of 3.2GHz. The report also reconfirms that the graphics processor unit used in the E3 machine was not the RSX chip that will be used in the final product but is another Nvidia GPU, possibly the just-announced GeForce 7800 GTX. The article also appears to be the source of an unconfirmed (but convincing) image of a PlayStation 3 dev kit, the first such picture to be made public (pictured).

While the exact technical specifications of the GPU remain a secret, ITmedia reports that it uses the PCI Express bus instead of the PS3's Redwood bus interface licensed from Rambus.