PlayStation 3 Hardware

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The PlayStation 3''s hardware consists of both the internal systems and a number of peripherals such as the DUALSHOCK 3 controller. Unless otherwise noted, the following specifications are based on a press release by Sony at the E3 2005 conference, and slides from a Sony presentation at the 2006 Game Developer''s Conference. The PS3 uses the Cell microprocessor, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and an eighth is a spare to improve production yields. PlayStation 3''s Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 has 256MB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed. As of firmware update 2.01, 32MB of the XDR memory is reserved by the PS3''s XrossMediaBar user interface, more XDR memory is required for multiple XMB operations to function at one time.