The Multiple Brains of the PlayStation 3

One of the most popular seventh-generation game consoles is Sony's PlayStation 3. The cool thing about the PS3 is that it is not just an ordinary gaming console. The company designed it to support all types of digital entertainment. In its most basic sense, it is a home entertainment computer.

At the console's core is its innovative multi-core Cell processor technology. It is composed of a 3.2-gigahertzcentral processing core that can easily run a computer by itself. However, in Cell technology, it acts more like a manager of sorts. As soon as it is fed with a computational workload, the core delegates the processing of data to eight other processors called synergistic processing elements (SPEs) to achieve maximum efficiency. To give you an idea of how powerful the Cell is, consider the processor of one of the most powerful desktops available, which crams 200 million transistors onto a single die (a tiny semiconductor wafer). The Cell can cram up to 234 million transistors! This makes the PS3 more than capable of running next-generation games.

Since rendering exceptional graphics is vital to video games, the PlayStation 3 also incorporates a 550-megahertz microprocessor called a graphic processing unit (GPU) that is solely dedicated to creating and displaying graphics. There are 300 million transistors per die in this chip, meaning it has more transistors than the central processing units and the GPUs of three leading current-generation consoles combined! Simply put, the PS3's GPU has the power to create extremely realistic environments that include real-time lighting, shadows, and reflections.

Because of the extremely advanced processors, this console from Sony can also store photos, play movies and songs, connect to the Internet, produce high-fidelity sounds, and run DVD and Blu-ray discs.