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PlayStation 3 - New chip

PlayStation 3 has been the most anticipated video game console in years. The original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 have dominated the video game console market since 1994, when the original PSP debuted. One of the features that make PSP 3 so attractive to hard core gamers is its new chip design.

The new chip within PlayStation 3 is called the Cell processor. The Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 has 234 million transistors on a single die. It is important to compare this to current CPU’s. The Intel dual-core Pentium Processor Extreme Edition has fewer transistors (200 million) than the Cell processor.

The Cell processor is set up to make it extremely efficient in tackling the computation job of processing high end video game graphics, as well as other uses such as internet and playing other types of media.

The Cell has a 3.2 GHz PowerPC core which has 512 KB of L2 cache. While this chip is extremely powerful and able to run a high end computer, it is delegated to manage the other eight chips on board.

While most of the workload is handled by the PowerPC core, the core then delegates work to other SPE’s (Synergistic Processing Elements). Doling out work to specific SPE’s maximizes performance and efficiency. It should be noted that while there are eight SPE’s on the PowerPC core, only seven of them are normally used, the eighth is a fail safe, in case one fails. SPE’s in the Cell are 128-bit vector processors that are SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data).

One of the most anticipated aspects of the PSP 3 chip is the separate GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) that is on board called RSX (Reality Synthesizer). This GPU is a 550 MHz, 300 million transistor GPU chip, more powerful than all three current generation video game systems combined.

Taken into consideration, the PlayStation 3 new chip design is unprecedented in terms of power and performance