Wow,.. people make it sound like the cell has life of its own here.. Hybrid ? since when.
And why mix Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) with cores ..
SPEs are not Cores. Again SPEs are not cores.
The Cell is a single core CPU with 8 SPEs, one SPE is locked-out , another one is reserved for the OS leaving 6 free SPEs to be used by games' code..
Developers only has access to 6 SPEs .
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor#Commercialization
Xenon consist of 3 independent processor CORES on a single die. These cores are slightly modified versions of the PPE in the Cell processor which was designed specifically for the PlayStation 3. Each core has 3 symmetric hardware threads (SMT), for a total of 6 hardware threads available to games.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_(processor)
In theory the Cell is slighty faster then the Xenon cpu but realistically both are similar in strength according to IBM's creator of both chips ..
My Trigger Happy Sixaxis controller
