Short answers, pulled from the story.
The PlayStation 3 sold approximately 87.4 million units worldwide, making it the eighth best-selling console of all time. The United States accounted for 22.9 million units, Europe for 30 million, and Japan for 9.3 million.
The PlayStation 3 used the Cell Broadband Engine, a 64-bit CPU co-developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM running at 3.2 GHz. It included a PowerPC-based Power Processing Element and six Synergistic Processing Elements available to game developers.
The 20 GB model cost an estimated US$805.85 to manufacture but retailed for US$499, while the 60 GB model cost US$840.35 and sold for US$599. Sony accumulated roughly US$3.3 billion in cumulative hardware losses through mid-2008.
Sony announced the PlayStation 3 Slim on the 18th of August 2009 at its Gamescom press conference, and it reached major territories by September 2009 at a price of US$299.
In 2010, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory built the Condor Cluster from 1,760 PS3 consoles, achieving 500 trillion floating-point operations per second and ranking as the 33rd most powerful supercomputer in the world. A separate 200-console cluster was used in 2008 to crack SSL encryption.
On the 20th of April 2011, Sony shut down the PlayStation Network after detecting an external intrusion, revealing on the 23rd of April that personal information for 77 million users may have been compromised. Sony responded with free PlayStation Plus membership, two free PS3 games, and identity theft protection for affected users.