Sony Computer Entertainment chief technology officer Masa Chatani gave some intriguing comments at E3 this year.

In the fourth quarter of this year Sony Computer Entertainment and IBM plan to debut the first prototype of a powerful workstation based on the Cell. The workstation will prefigure the eventual arrival of a Cell-based development tool for Sony's next game console.

The workstation will use a new development environment created by Sony and IBM and will feature some of the same development tools as the eventual PS3 development kit. The workstation will include the following features:

• Rendering modeling
• Visual effects
• Facial expressions
• Physics
• AI Behaviour
• Testing and analysis
• And many others

Sony will handle the applications, tools, and middleware for the new platform, while IBM will develop the operating systems and hardware.

While the workstation will precede the dedicated development tool, Chatani said it will still play a key role in the development of games, taking care of intensive tasks like physics simulation and movie rendering. It's also not limited to game applications. Sony and IBM plan to market it for use in digital content creation for movies and other media.

Chatani expects movies, games and other entertainment - to share a common delivery medium, reaching the user through a network created by numerous broadband-connected Cell-powered consoles dubbed the "Cyber World," claiming that users will one day "jack in" and seamlessly navigate a networked virtual world acquiring whatever entertainment they want.