MikeB on 01 May 2008
@ TheBigFatJ
The PS3 doesn't have "seven processors"
No, the PS3 Cell includess 8 active processors. 1 PPE and 7 SPEs. The SPE is a processor which allows for one hardware thread (and any number of software threads), the PPE allows for two hardware threads (and of course software threads).
The PPE is most similar to a Xenon core, the advantage of the SPEs is that potential performance increases just about linear with added SPEs. This is not the case for the Xenon CPU, three cores does not mean three times the potential performance, just like AFAIK any other multi-core CPU currently available.
To be more exact, the SPEs are more than just processors. They can compute independently from the rest of the system, that's why they are often referred to as a system on a chip.
