I have recently been taking a diploma course in computer science and learned quite a bit about hardware theory and I have always been curious about fully understanding the argument for and against the PS3. Until now I wasnt able to fully grasp it and I am hoping now someone can point out how the PS3 overcomes some of the limitations I have been told about at my school.
For instance, my teacher has told by the CPUs are the last thing you want to upgrade because quite simply they operate MUCH faster than anything else on the computer. In fact the biggest issue about upgrading computers has been discovering ways to get more data to the CPU to catch up, but even with all of this focus on catching up to the CPU, upgrades in CPU speed have been happening even faster than the hardware around it widening the gap.
The reason for this is simply the limitations of the bus (data channel) sending data to the CPU. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This is quite simply the issue we are faced with. So its physically impossible to make a faster bus. So over the past 20 or so years, people have been coming up with solutions like wider channels, and some very interesting solutions using memory. While I assume the PS3 overcomes the limitations of a CPU with these solutions, the truth is that those solutions are incredibly expensive. Sufficed to say the most common solutions have been cache memory, and a larger bus. So a good question might be what is the bus and cache size of the PS3?
(EXPLANATION OF THE HARDWARE THEORY FOR THOSE THAT WANT TO HEAR IT)
CPU - As I said earlier, they operate faster than anything most of the time and the amount of time that a CPU is actually even using the majority of its resources is very low.
1) The CPU receives and instruction.
2) The CPU needs data from memory in order to complete this function so what it does first is it checks the cache (For now lets just say that it wasnt in the cache)
3) So it goes to memory, is it in memory? (No)
4) So it goes and fetches the data from the hard drive. While its in the hard drive, it gathers everything around the data item that it needed. It completely fills memory and cache with this data. Why? Because its operating under the assumption that if you needed this one data item, you will probably need the data items related to it in the near future.
Memory - a smaller hard drive that is closer to the CPU Also much faster than the harddrive.
Cache Memory - Even smaller and MUCH faster hard drive, almost built on top of the CPU.
