Sony revealed during their E3 press conference yesterday that the present 40GB SKU is soon to be replaced by a new 80GB model, set to occupy the same $399 price point being vacated by the 40GB at the time of its introduction in September.  The 40GB unit has already been discontinued, and existing stock on retail shelves will be allowed to sell to depletion.  Besides the expanded hard drive, the new unit will come with a Dual Shock 3 controller vs the older non-rumble Sixaxis shipped with previous models. 

As the MGS4 bundle will be leaving retail once its own supplies are exhausted, this will return Sony to the single-SKU line-up they had for a brief time with the 40GB console prior to the MGS4 bundle announcement.  For the time being, it will also remove backwards-compatible units from store shelves in North America.  The Playstation unit shipped within the MGS4 bundle was stated from the beginning to be a temporary return of the technology, unique to that particular bundle. 

Sony has launched their much anticipated video store for the Playstation Network, allowing users to rent or purchase for download TV and movie content from several major studios, including Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, Sony Studios, and Warner Brothers. 

Accessed through the Playstation Store via a new 'video' button on the upper-left hand corner, prices for rentals presently run $2.99 or $3.99 for standard definition, and $5.99 for HD content.  Given a broadband Internet connection, playback may commence after roughly one minute of buffering.  Purchases through the store are presently available on standard definition only, and range from $9.99 to $14.99 in price.  An additional benefit of purchasing, however, is that content may be transferred to a registered PSP for mobile playback and/or display on a television through the use of the PSP-2000 and the video-out cables. For consideration of PSP useage, it is worth noting that the files presently average a little under 2GB, requiring the owner to possess a larger memory stick to make practical.

Sony Computer Entertainment introduced Playstation 3 firmware 2.40 yesterday, bringing with it the long awaited capacity to access the system Cross Media Bar (XMB) while in-game.  The most immediate benefit of this change is the ability for PS3 owners to message one another via the PS3's text-based messaging system without need of exiting from game, a limitation that has been a source of frustration in the past for players wishing to coordinate their actions.  In addition, 2.40 introduces the capability for developers to support audio stored on the PS3's hard drive in their games.

Sony also launched their response to Microsoft's "achievements" system, premised on the idea of trophy acquisition.  The meta-game system allows for the storage and display of certain honorifics associated with per-title gaming prowess, which take the form of trophies commemorating the achievement of certain skill-based goals.  Most games going forward are expected to support the trophy system.

This week, the world of computing officially entered the petaflop era with the announcement that the Los Alamos National Laboratory's 'Roadrunner' had become the first supercomputer in history to cross the psychologically significant threshold of a thousand-trillion calculations per second, achieving 1.026 R_max PFlops in Linpack. 

Debuting at over twice the speed of November 2007's Top500 champion - Lawrence Livermore's BlueGene/L - the significance of the milestone is such that just a week out from ISC '08 (June 17th-20th), the conference has added a special panel discussion to their program entitled “RoadRunner - the First Petaflop/s System in the World and Its Impact on Supercomputing.” This session will be open to all show attendees.  Fittingly, Roadrunner also serves as the first major example of heterogeneous/hybrid supercomputing at a time when the trends of massive parallelism, heterogeneous system architecture, and consumer-driven chip design have come to be seen by the HPC community as the keys to future application performance gains in a post-clockspeed age.