if anyone here is a member of the ieee and receives their magazine, you already know this.  ieee did a comparison of the original 2006 version sony playstation 3  to the sandia lab's asci red supercomputer which was finished in 1997.  here are the results.

peak performance: supercopmuter 1.8 teraflops, ps3 1.8 teraflops

physical size: supercomputer 150 square meters,  ps3 .08 square meters

power consumption: supercomputer 800,000 watts, ps3 < 200 watts

thats some pretty phenomenal stuff to accomplish in just 9 years.

EDIT: for those of you who dont know what a teraflop is, its one trillion floating point operations per second

Wow O.o thats pretty impressive.

knewing that w/o being a member. :>

yes, the PS3 is, theoretically, much stronger than 360 Wii combined. The Problem is, that the stuff inside the 360 is more opted for gaming than the PS3, so much of this power is gone to waste.

Really? I didn't know that.  So PS3's architecture is wasting that much energy?  Source?  Stronger than both combined would be nuts...

energy? you mean processing power, right? well, thats actually pretty known, the easiest thing would be to search for some interviews.. this one for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PFUw29U4J8

For apps that do not require graphical presentation (Folding / Military stuff.. u know that US Supercomputer Story of 2,200 PS3s, no?) the Cell is a beast. and its not hard to be stronger than both in this thing, because the wii is maybe 1/6 of a 360 in terms of processing power.

Ignore the GPU and focus specifically on sending graphics and sound data singularly through the Cell and you can make an amazing game (killzone and Uncharted for example)

The Cell (which is one of the worlds best CPU and GPU) doesnt cooperate/communicate with the PS3's Main GPU all that well. 

Uncharted 2 unlocked half the power of the Cell by completely ignoring the main GPU, and Exclusives havent looked back since.

BTW bet on the PS4 having one 16-Core Cell Processor and one 8-Core Cell Processor.  The 8-core being the mainstay GPU and the 16-core as the CPU.  Expect 4 cores of the 16-core Cell to be used as mainstay Security, and one for the XMB2.

Leaving 11 Cores for general processes and 8 cores for Graphic rediculousness.

Scoop.

Don't forget that one Core will be disabled to cut costs :D

Cell is not THAT good in GPU. They went from the 2xCell PS3 in 2004/2005 to the  Cell RSX in 2006. They realized that Cell doesn't surpass even a cheap GPU in some tasks. Its a waste for a CPU, with can process complex codes, to only perform simple tasks that only requires brutal force, like a GPU.

What I find funny is that all the experience that IBM gained by developing the Cell was used to make the Xenos(x360's processor). There are even rumours about some secrets of Cell being revealed for the development of Xenos, like while Sony IBM Toshiba were developing the Cell, some workers from IBM worked in both projects. Xenos have 3 PPUs almost identical of the Cell one. Both have 3.2GHz. I think that Microsoft wanted to make a console easy to make ports from. By releasing X360 early, MS pretty much assured that would have a very good support for their plataform. For the very loyal developers, there is nothing that money can't buy...

Actually, I think that if the PS3 didn't have a Blu-Ray, but instead a 8800GTX as GPU, they could have outsold Xbox360by a larger margin at today.

Why would anyone create something that powerful and only use a bit of it :P

Bragging rights?

Doesn't seem to be making a big impact in gaming.