The processor used in the PlayStation 3 is called the Cell Broadband Engine, commonly shortened to Cell. Sony developed it with Toshiba and IBM through the STI alliance, and the PS3 became its best-known commercial application.
The Cell is not a conventional single-core processor. Its design combines one 64-bit PowerPC-based Power Processing Element with multiple Synergistic Processing Elements, or SPEs, specialized for highly parallel workloads such as physics, graphics assistance, audio, and video processing. The PS3 version operated at 3.2 GHz.
The chip was manufactured with eight SPEs, but one was disabled to improve production yields and another was reserved for the operating system. Six SPEs were generally available to game developers. This unusual structure gave the PS3 impressive theoretical performance but also made programming more difficult than on competing consoles.
The Emotion Engine was the main processor in the PlayStation 2, while the RSX was the PS3’s Nvidia-developed graphics processor. Neither is the PS3’s primary processor. The Cell’s distinctive architecture influenced several PS3-exclusive games and was also used in high-performance computing projects, including clusters built from PS3 consoles.