Rumours this week are that production yields for the 3.5GHz Cell processor for the PS3 are not high enough, and that the processor speed is likely to be reduced to 2.8GHz for the final shipping PS3s later this year in November. The same article mentions that they may be having cooling issues with the hardware crammed into a case that’s too small, so expect to see an external PSU brick instead of an internal unit.
Sony may also have faced issues ensuring backwards compatibility with PS2 and PS One support running in software emulation, so rumours last week suggested that the initial versions of the PS3 will come including the PS2 chipset in the box. Wow, thats quite amazing and a surprise. The PS2 emulates the original Playstation in software running on the one of it’s chips that’s not even the main CPU (I can’t remember which, but I think it’s the I/O controller chip).