With the usual amount of fanfare, IBM, Toshiba and Sony announced today some details on their "Cell" technology that will eventually power the PlayStation 3. The processor is nearly "taped out" (the hardware equivalent of going gold), and commercial production could happen at the end of 2004. So how powerful is this thing? It can handle a whole teraflop of calculations per second, and is said to be roughly 100 times more powerful than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4. All of this hinges on its multi-core design, which I won't attempt to explain here. It all sounds great on paper, but the real test will come when games are developed for the thing, and it sounds like this will not make things any easier for developers, as it is said, "to take an enormous amount of software development" which is, oddly enough, what they said about the PS2. Enjoy this PS3 update (regardless of its content), because it's likely to be the last one for a while.

	GameCube Beats Xbox Because I know how much everyone loves these stories...Reuters today ran a story saying that Nintendo has amassed "a considerable" hardware sales lead over Microsoft. But they also said this won't last, and the Xbox will outsell the GameCube in 2003. All of this adds up to exactly squat.
	Doom II With Co-Op! Activision today finally formally announced Doom II for the Game Boy Advance, which is being developed by Torus Games. The game's been old news for a while now, but the press release contains the first mention that it will support co-op multiplayer. Cooooool.
	Soul Calibur II Preview An updated preview of Soul Calibur II is up at GameSpot this evening.
	Hands-on Previews Also new at GameSpot are a crapload of hands-on impressions of Infogrames titles...specifically there's Unreal Championship, Superman: The Man of Steel, Dungeons & Dragons Heroes, and Apex (all Xbox) Godzilla: Domination (GBA) and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee (GameCube).
	Buffy Goes Gold According to PlanetXbox, Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Xbox has gone gold, and will be in stores the week of August 20th. It'll be right up against Mario Sunshine of all things.
	Enclave Multi-platform IGN is reporting that Enclave, the third person action-adventure title that was recently released for the Xbox, will be coming out for GameCube, PS2 and PC later this year.
	Grandia Xtreme Voices In a very strange bit of news, GameSpot is reporting that Mark Hamil, Dean Cain, and Lisa Loeb will be providing voices for the North American version of Grandia Xtreme.
	Kingdom Hearts Release Date Speaking of strange PS2 RPGs, Kingdom Hearts (which has quite a unique vocal cast itself) has been given a release date of September 17th. It has also been announced that new difficulty modes, new boss battles and a surprise appearance by a Final Fantasy villain have been added to this local release.