Applications such as modern Playstation video games that use 3D, video and intensive media require both fast CPUs and fast interfaces with memory and coprocessors. The PS3 console appears to be well poised for the task. According to cellsupercomputer.com, a single Cell chip can perform 1 trillion floating point operations per second (flops). This corresponds to 1 TFLOP (1 teraflop = 1000 gigaflops) that would boost the Playstation 3 to a speed that is over hundred times faster than a high-end personal computer.

A more realistic view is presented by Realworldtech.com, reporting that
each Cell chip consists of one Processing Element (PE) based on IBM’s POWER Architecture and eight 128-bit vector processors called Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) that aid in the task of parallel processing. Running at 4 GHz, the Cell processor is capable of achieving a peak throughput rate of 256 GFlops from the 8 SPE’s (1000 GigaFlop = 1 TeraFlop).

The current Playstation 2’s CPU runs at only 300 MHz, but it’s floating point unit (FPU) is capable of a peak performance of over 6 gigaflops. Peak performance and real world output are different things though. In comparison, one of the fastest consumer computers available today, a dual 2 Ghz Apple Mac G5, is rated at a real-world performance of 9 gigaflops, although Apple’s marketing people claim 30 gigaflops for their Xserve G5 server that is based on dual 2 Ghz G5 chips.

In 2001, when Sony’s “father of Play Station” Ken Kutaragi announced the Cell project for the PS3, he spoke of a new machine that would possess 200-1000 times the performance of the current Playststation 2 console. Going by the current estimations of what a Cell based computer or video games console is able to achieve, it appears that this claim wasn’t too far off reality after all!

The processor bus interfaces designed by Rambus provides the Playstation 3 with an unprecedented I/O bandwidth of approximately 100 GB/s (gigabytes per second), which makes the use of this technology ideal for high performance entertainment applications such as Playstation 3 video games. In comparison, a dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5 system offers a throughput of 20 GB/s, which by many is considered an absolute milestone.

The current Playstation 2 architecture already features a bus bandwith of 3.2 GB/s. Interestingly, the original PlayStation CPU core functions as I/O processor in the PS2, and one is left to wonder whether the current PS2 CPU will have a similar fate in the future PS3, not at least to ensure 100% backward compatibility to the PS2.