It also had 2 HDMI ports and 2 interweb ports. ... He wanted it to be able to go to a resolution that a single hdmi output wouldn't allow.. that's crasy XD in a good way though.. cause it's awesome.

 Man people arer still ignorant about the architecture of the ps3 the ps3 cell is a graffic gard for itself because he can procees graffics and AI just like a graffics card, the procesor is not like a PC so it can do that procces with no problem at all, with this the ps3 do not need a lot of RAM, and the 256 MB or Ram that uses as a primary memory is used as a Cache memory for the Cell, and if the developer want it it can use the OS dedicated memory and use it to the game to. So again the developer that issues that the ps3 have no RAM is because they develop like a PC that need a lot of RAM because the processor can not procces Memory task very well, but if you see games developing onlty on the PS3 you will see how this plataform have those grafics with only 256MB of memory, thats because the ps3 do not work with RAM it work with the cell and uses the RAM only for cache to help the procesor. Just look Killzone 2 the best game on a plataform and the game do not use all the cell cores, and uncharted only 30 percent of the cell was used because the cores of the cell can be used for dedicated tsk including AI sound and textures.

While we're on the topic of PS3's planned features which didn't materialize, I remember it was also going to work as a network router. Wasn't there also talk about having several Cell processors instead of a GPU? I'm not sure about this last one.

Of course this was all before Sony partly woke up from their wet dreams.

The PS3 has plenty of RAM, the problem lies with the OS which uses a whopping 91 MBs of RAM. This is not the only limiting factor for the PS3 though, the complexity of programming for the Cell and an outrageously slow disc read speed don't help. The Blu-Ray drive only reads at 9MB/s which is simply inadequate, it is possibly the PS3's biggest limitation. In my opinion, the PS3's architecture is a disaster, considering the R&D expenditures and $900 cost per unit at launch the PS3 should have been much more well designed.

A lot of people in this thread seem to have misconceptions about the PS3's available and dedicated RAM thinking that it has 256 dedicated solely to the RSX and 256 dedicated solely to the Cell. Like the 360 which has 512MB of RAM to spend on the graphics chip as well as the system, the PS3 also has 512MB of RAM that can be shared. However, unlike the 360, 256MB of that 512MB is dedicated solely on the graphics chip. The rest of the 256MB can be used on either the graphics chip or the Cell processor. It's worth noting though that the Cell really doesn't need very much RAM due to the fact that it's exceptionally fast on it's own. This means that, in practice, the PS3 has more RAM that a developer can afford to dedicate to the graphics chip than the 360. I would imagine that this may be part of the reason that most of the particularly exceptional looking games this gen such as Gran Turismo 5, Killzone 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, Uncharted, Heavy Rain, and others have been exclusively developed on the PS3.

you kill your own argument when you say the cell dose not need that much ram because its exceptionally fast on its own...... that right there means it actually needs more ram, so that it has data ready to feed into it, otherwise its waiting for information to processes. this wait causes wasted cpu cycles, and loss of overall performance. aka the cell needs more ram. 

Yeah, in geneal goddog is right, but the cell is sort of a special case. Being in order would normally mean less memory and cache needed, just because the machine is going to be waiting on certain things to get done, but when you scale up the cores and don't add an L3 cache or take any other measures to deal with cache coherency, you're going to end up needing a lot more RAM.

The truth is that both 360 and PS3 are a bit ram starved for what they want to do, but that's true of most consoles since RAM is initially a big cost.

I think they should have put 1gb into it.  And then ported open office, firefox etc. to their platform.  Then they could sell the PS3 as a computer and console in one. As it is now they are trying to build all the functionality from scratch.. it's going to take for bleeding ever. (The webbrowser is still.. just barely passable, at least if it was top notch you could use google apps on it!)  Or you could just run LInux on it (which i do!, but 256mb of ram just seems so low... and limits what you can do with it.)

The ram limitation is my only real complaint with the ps3. 

Not that any other console has more ram (the xbox360 has 512mb of general purpose ram... but no video ram.  while the ps3 has 256mb of each).

If nothing else, there should be a way to UPGRADE the memory.

256 XBR RAM

which is much faster than 320 mb of normal ram..

Um..... it's doing quite fine with 256 XDR and 256 DDR3 when the dev's actually try :S