At Home With Games

Yahoo News

More than one-third of U.S. adults who go online own a video game console and 16 percent own a portable gaming device. Among the top three gaming heavyweights -- Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft -- Nintendo leads the pack of the most Web traffic growth over the past year, likely due to the success of Nintendo's new Wii console.

Unique visitors to Nintendo.com increased 91 percent, from February 2006 to February 2007. Xbox.com also saw significant year-over-year growth in February, increasing 47 percent. The numbers show a shift that will most likely position the gaming console against the PC and TV as the entertainment source for the entire family. Both Microsoft and Sony are pushing their Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles as multimedia hubs for gaming, watching movies, and viewing pictures.

IBM announced on Monday that it is beginning production of a 65-nanometer version of its Cell Broadband Engine, the multicore chip that powers the graphics processing of the Sony PlayStation 3. Among other things, the chip has nine processors with a top clock speed of over 4 GHz, and can operate multiple operating systems at the same time. The announcement this week by IBM that it is shrinking the size of the Cell chip by more than 25 percent raises the possibility that the cost of the PlayStation 3 might come down. The smaller Cell will use less power than its 90-nanometer predecessor and should cost less.

Microsoft announced that its Live online service will be extended to PC users in May, broadening its reach beyond the Xbox 360 console gamers now using Live. The PC version of Live will launch with a version of "Halo 2," a popular game featuring alien battles, and will be geared for Windows Vista.

A few months later, Microsoft Game Studios is scheduled to release a title, called "Shadowrun," that will encourage competition between Xbox 360 and PC players.

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