The original PlayStation 3 or 'PS3' Released on 11/11/2006 in Japan, 17/11/2006 in America and 23/03/2007 in Europe
In 2006, Sony unveiled the long-awaited ‘next generation’ video-game console, a shiny (albeit heavy) machine whose underlying hardware architecture continues the teachings of the Emotion Engine, that is, focus on vector processing to achieve power, even at the cost of complexity. Meanwhile, their new ‘super processor’, the Cell Broadband Engine, is conceived during a crisis of innovation and will have to keep up as trends for multimedia services evolve.
This write-up takes a deep look at Sony, IBM, Toshiba and Nvidia’s joint project, along with its execution and effect on the industry.
I’m afraid this article is not the typical ‘lunchtime’ one that I usually write for other consoles in this series. If you are interested in every area of the Playstation 3, you are in for the whole journey! Having said that, this writing encompasses ~6 years of research and development carried out by countless engineers, so I don’t expect you to digest it all at once. Please take your time (and breaks if needed) and if at the end you are hungry for more, help yourself at the ‘Sources’ section!
Welcome to the most recognisable and innovative part of this console.
The PS3’s CPU is massively complex, but it’s also a very fascinating work of engineering that intersects complex needs and unusual solutions, prominent in an era of change and experimentation. So, before we step into the internals of the PS3’s CPU, I wrote the following paragraphs to bring some historical context into the article. Consequently, we’ll be able to decompose the chip from top to bottom in a way that not only you will understand how this chip works, but also get the reasoning behind major design decisions.
The PS1’s CPU (1994). Designed by LSI and Sony, using MIPS' technology.
The PS2’s Emotion Engine (2001). Designed by Toshiba, with MIPS' technology, again.
Almost ten years after the introduction of the original MIPS-powered Playstation, we find ourselves in the early noughties, and things are not looking good for SGI/MIPS. Nintendo recently ditched them for a low-end PowerPC core with IBM as their new supplier while Microsoft, the newcomer in this market, chose Intel and their x86 empire.
Sony has a history of grabbing existing low-end designs (cheap MIPS cores) and moulding them to achieve acceptable 3D performance at a reduced cost, a process that involved other companies like LSI (for the PS1’s CPU) and Toshiba (for the PS2’s Emotion Engine). This methodology carried on until 2004 with the release of the Playstation Portable. So, what new MIPS amalgamate were they going to build for the PlayStation 3?
Well, it turns out the development of the Playstation 3 predates the Playstation Portable one [1]. In 2000, months after the PS2’s release, Sony formed an alliance with IBM and Toshiba called ‘STI’ with the sole goal to deliver the next chip that could power the next generation of supercomputers [2]. If this didn’t sound extravagant enough, the next chip would also be used on the successor of the PS2. In the end, in 2004, IBM unveiled the Cell Broadband Engine (also known as ‘Cell BE’ or just ‘Cell’) [3].
