D-Fly writes "Charlie Demerijian at the Inquirer got a look at some insider specs on the PS3, and says, Sony screwed up big time with the Cell processor; the memory read speed on the current Devkits is something like 3 orders of magnitude slower than the write speed; and is unlikely to improve much before the ship date. The slide from Sony pictured in the article is priceless: 'Local Memory Read Speed ~16Mbps, No this isn't a Typo.' Demerjian says when the PS3 comes out a full year after the XBox360, it's still going to be inferior: 'Someone screwed up so badly it looks like it will relegate the console to second place behind the 360.'" This is the Inquirer, so take with a grain of salt. Just the same, doesn't sound too good for Sony or IBM.

GameDailyBiz has a piece up looking into the crashing and overheating problems that have plagued the Xbox 360 since the system launched. A new crashing problem seems to be associated with the most recent update to the Xbox Live software, while german forum-goers think they may have identified the overheating issue. From the article: "The way it's installed now by MS the GPU chip makes contact with the protection foil instead of the heat transfer pad. This can of course cause cooling issues for the graphics chip as for optimal cooling performance there should just be a thin layer of thermal pad between the GPU chip and heatsink."

Next Generation reports on Microsoft's 5000th patent: an online spectator mode for competitive games. From the article: "The system will allow online viewers who are not involved in actual gameplay to view game highlights and instant replays, as well as let them control camera perspectives. A statement from Microsoft also describes 'A portal such as a Web site to access spectator-related services such as schedules and information on multiple games and events as well as the number of spectators and participants in each. The portal allows the spectator to find the most popular games to watch, preview the action, and then connect to the desired game or event.'"