Processor
Cell Broadband Engine
A PowerPC core surrounded by eight SPE vector co-processors, of which the PlayStation 3 uses seven. Sony's specification counts the eighth as redundancy.
- Manufacturer
- Sony Computer Entertainment / IBM / Toshiba
- Architecture
- One PowerPC core with a VMX unit, plus eight SPE co-processors
- Introduced
- 2005
- Word size
- 64 bit
- Capacity
- 256 kB
- Capacity
- 512 kB
- Core count
- 1
- Instruction set
- PowerPC with VMX, alongside the SPE instruction set
- Record status
- approved
Figures
provisional A figure marked provisional is recorded but not accepted: its evidence is unsettled. It may rely on one source, an unconfirmed announcement, or a digit read from a damaged scan. The reason appears under the figure. The catalog shows the figure but never uses it in a multiplier. How records are judged.
| Metric | Value | Evidence | Basis | Method | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peak FP32 rate cpu provisional | 218 GFLOP/s | Confirmed | Vendor-rated | Theoretical peak Stated by the vendor, before the hardware shipped "Total floating point performance" of the Cell processor — the PowerPC core with its VMX unit and all seven SPEs — per the announcement of May 2005. Recorded as single precision on the strength of the SPEs being single-precision units, which is an editorial reading and not a citation: the source states no precision. Provisional on that ground as well as on being a pre-launch figure. Reviewed again against the instruction manual printed for the console that shipped (CECHA01, 2006): its specification table names the Cell and the RSX without a frequency for either and both memories without a transfer rate, so no post-launch Sony document corroborates this figure and it stays provisional. |
Fitted to
Editorial notes
The "cores" field records the single PowerPC core, because the SPEs do not run the same instruction set and cannot be counted alongside it. Whether the chip is one processor or nine is a question the catalog's data model declines to answer, and the answer would change the meaning of every per-core figure attached to it.