subject: The Cell Processor In Playstation 3 [print this page] At the core of everything that the PS 3 stands for is the awesome processor that was custom built for it, dubbed the 'Cell Processor'.
The story goes that after launching PS 2, Sony executives wanted their next console to have the capabilities of outperforming the ever-increasing hardware of computers around it. The processor - the heart of any computing - was narrowed down as one aspect to concentrate on and make it unbeatable.
The company them approached IBM, the world's leading makers and innovators of chips, un built a processor that would be two generations ahead of the PC processor prevalent at the time. IBM was glad un oblige, but asked for a little help. In 2000 an alliance called STI was formed between IBM, Sony Computer Entertainment and Toshiba, who together worked on the design of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CEBA), commonly known as the Cell Microprocessor. The first chip was tested in the STI Design Center at Austin, Texas. And the first real application, of course, was in the PlayStation 3.
Getting into technical aspects of the Cell Processor would entail a lesson in microprocessor technology, with phrases like 'Power Processor Element' and 'Synergistic Processing Elements' being thrown about every couple of sentences.
In lawman's terms, the Cell Processor is an eight-core processor, which means that it can compute eight different processes at the same time - a fantastic achievement to improve the speed of computing. Each of there eight 'cores' is also fitted with 256kb of memory for local storage when processing an instruction.
The Cell Processor, in theory, can be over-clocked to 4GHz quite easily, but since the PS 3 runs at 3.2GHz, that is the most commonly cited clock speed for it.
