@Groucho
Sony has been improving it by leaps and bounds. I don't think its much bigger than 32MB anymore. It never really comes into the picture, performance-wise, in my experience.
If you are dev, shouldn't you be able to check how much mem there really is? If theres no functions that tell you the amount of mem available, you can always try to fill it with more variables you actually can, catch error for using more memory there is and throw the results on the screen. I am quite sure that your requirements documents have also some mention about restriction of platform as well(Unless you don't document your work, which is a sure way to developing hell. ;) ).
I'd be surprised if 3 CPUs with altivec co-processors could outperform 6 vector processors and another CPU with an Altivec. I sincerely doubt its possible. Each SPU is much speedier than the PPU's Altivec (identical to the Xenon core's Altivecs), when it comes to vector work. The Xenon cores can't do out-of-order processing, just like the PPU and the SPUs, and its branch predictor is practically worthless, just like the PPU's (they are basically the same core, with some interesting threading differences).
Regarding to processing power my question has always been "What can you do with all that power?". Games today use only few percents of processing power of CPU even if you help GPU with geometry transformations etc. PS3 has a lot of power but it seems to be power you really dont need or can't really use because of all other restrictions.
