How the PS3 should work

By Ariel Antebi . March 29, 2006 . 1:01pm

Schematic of the cell processor

One of the SPEs (Synergetic Processing Element)

PPE (Power Processing Element) Summary

- Based off of the PowerPC processor

- For the operating system and scheduling

- 512 KiB for a L2 local cache

- The PPE is not intended to be the primary processor, but act as a controller for the SPEs.

SPE (Synergetic Processing Element) Summary

- RISC based processor

- The SPE is programmable with C/C++

- Has no random access to the main ram

- Designed for high bandwidth computation

- Seven SPEs are active in the PS3, an eighth is provided as a backup SPE

Inside each SPE is a SPU (Synergetic Processing Unit)

- Each SPU has a 128 x 128 register file

- Supports two way instructions

- Has 256KiB of local storage

- a MFC Memory Flow Controller manages DMA and is a memory management unit

RSX (Reality Synthesizer) used for graphics

- Co-developed by NVIDIA and Sony

- Based of the NV47

- 24 2D lookups per flop

- 384 FLOPS / clock

- 256 MB of dedicated video memory

- HD ready (720p/1080p)

The PS3 has middleware support from Ageia, Havok, Epic and Metrowerks.

2,900 development systems went out to development teams since last summer and over 100 sites are working on PS3 content.