The folks at PlayStation 3 Portal have been gathering news, that has been "validated by multiple sources that are involved in early PS3 development." Nothing is confirmed and Sony has time to alter these statistics, but here is what the Portal has learned:

• A "'Blade' like pane that can appear on the right hand side of the screen" that represents the PS3's always-running OS (similar to the Xbox 360's Dashboard).
• One will be able to use voice chat "across all games, even outside of the gamers own UI."
• The OS will always utilize 1 of 7 SPEs on the Cell chip, and the option to "take" another when needed --"games have to give it up if requested." In terms of RAM, the OS will use 18.75% of all available RAM (32mb of GDDR3 memory from the RSX chip, 64mb of the XDR memory from the Cell).

For the Specs:

• 32MB of the 256MB of available GDDR3 memory off the RSX chip
• 64MB of the 256MB of available XDR memory off the Cell CPU
• 1 SPE of 7 constantly reserved
• 1 SPE of 7 able to be "taken" by the OS at a moments notice (games have to give it up if requested)

The information presented is interesting, this is about 23% of the total system power for the PS3. The new trend in consoles having a constantly running operating system blurring the line between console and PC gaming. Fortunately, it seems the PlayStation 3 should be more than powerful enough to run both the OS and a game simultaneously. Of course we still don't know what kind of applications Sony has in mind for this nearly-quarter allotment, or if that's even going to be the final specification!