The most skeptical people in the face of the planet (no, I'm not referring to fanboys) are perhaps scientists. Their brains have become adapt at testing and observing things, making them highly critical on all fields. Pleasing one is as hard as convincing a PSPanatic that Ngage is a better handheld. So when the brainiacs of the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory get all excited over PS3's STI Cell Processor, it can only mean one thing - this is the 'machine'.

The said department has claimed that the processor can be the next big thing for scientific computing, adding that their tests showed that the cell's architecture had tremendous potential for scientific computations in terms of performance and power efficiency. Now they never mentioned that their findings translate to a better console overall, but getting nods from them is not very different from Tony Hawk saying you're good with skateboards.

THE STI Cell processor is being tucked inside the tank that is PS3. What really impressed the department was its heterogeneous multi-core implementation which they thought was better suited to the HPC environment than ordinary chips. The cell also takes a radical departure by using identical cooperating commodity processors which have a high performance PowerPC core that controls eight simple SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) cores.

They aren't about to worship it either as they pointed out one minor flaw. The cell works best with 32-bit tasks, but most scientific applications require 64-bit chips. Like I said earlier, although this technology is fused inside the belly of the upcoming PS3, it doesn't necesarily put them atop the other consoles - yet. Still, it won't hurt to assume that PlayStation 3 is slowly unveiling the weapons of a true next-gen console.