MikeB on 06 March 2007
@ Darc Requiem
The Cell is NOT technically an 8-core unit. The SPU's of the Cell are extremely limited in what they can do in comparison to a full core. In the case of the PS3, the Cell has a single core and six spus. One spu is turned off to increase the Cell's yield and the one spu is reserved to the systems OS)
The PPE is a 64 bit processor core (with an Altivec unit), the 7 SPEs are 128-bit processor cores. SPEs offer both enormous strenghts as well as some weaknesses compared to more ordinary processor cores. But at the uses they excel they are many times more powerful than traditional processor cores. One of the SPEs is fully reserved for the SystemOS running in the background and should soon be put to some good use. IMO this can be looked at as a good thing as new additional system-wide features should not impact game performance.
