I'm not entirely sure, but I believe the quad core processors are actually faster.. aren't they? cell is 3.2 ghz, and the intel processors nowadays can eclipse that easily. other than that, cell is obviously more expensive to produce. but anyway, what's the point of making this processor in the first place? can anyone give me the scoop?

 That Should explain it.

The Cell in its PS3 incarnation is a great processor for some applications, especially the ones which have the following characteristics:

1- not hard to distribute to a large number of cores (PS3's Cell has 7 cores)
2- intensive number-crunching without the need double-precision arithmetic (it's great for half or single precision arithmetic, but only gets around 1 GFLOP/s per core in double-precision which isn't great for a 3.2 GHz CPU)
3- each thread doesn't need to access tremendous amount of data (each core has a small amount of fast memory and other data needs to be transferred manually from memory)

If your application fulfills most of that, the Cell will give you great performance AND programming ease. Otherwise, performance, ease of programming or both will suffer.

Unfortunately, game engines don't fulfill the first attribute, and they only partly fulfill the second and third. This means it's hard to get performance out of the Cell on games, and much harder to tap the full power it has. It's already hard to fully tap a dual-core processor, it's much harder to tap 7 cores.

You don't have to take it from me though. Killzone 2's developers made a diagram which shows how much of the Cell they're tapping after years of engine development:



Notice that they're only using 5 of the 7 available cores, and even then not completely with lots of wasted CPU power (blank areas).

I'm not a games programmer, but based on the facts above and the opinions I've read from games programmers, I don't think the Cell was a very good choice for the PS3. A simpler processor would have been better given the complexity of making games.

so with that video, it kinda says that ps3 has more graphics power than pc. but we know that's not true. pc games are still far superior to any console games graphically.

What a load of crap

@bugrimmar
I think is not graphics but physic.

so in the end of it all, with all of the cell's power, how come pc games are still far superior graphically?

The point of the Cell was for Sony to be able to say they they have the most advanced system. Maybe they should have used their brains instead.

 If ya dont have anything nice to say, then dont say it at all, because you sir wont last long in VG.

A few reasons:

- PC CPUs are easier to program for.

- PCs have more memory (even after accounting for memory intensive operating systems)

- PCs have much better graphics cards than the PS3.