PLAYSTATION®3: An Engineering Masterpiece

At the heart of Sony Computer Entertainment’s breakthrough PLAYSTATION®3 system is the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell BE™) processor. The Cell BE is a multi-core processor employing a PowerPC processor element (PPE) and seven synergistic processor elements (SPE) to provide supercomputer capability in a home computer entertainment system. The Cell BE is capable of 218 GFlops performance.

Sony, Toshiba and IBM co-developed the Cell BE for a wide range of computing and consumer electronics applications with the PLAYSTATION 3 being the flagship product.

	"We are very pleased with the...work of the Rambus team..." Toshiyuki Hiroi, vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and one of the key persons involved in the PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3™) development, and David Nguyen, vice president of engineering at Rambus, discuss Rambus' role in the development of the PS3 which features the Cell Broadband Engine™ and XDR™ DRAM. Watch the video: Rambus Contributions to PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) Read the article: Contributing to the Realization of Both Low Cost and High Performance

Rambus XDR™ and FlexIO™ interfaces provide all the chip-to-chip connections between the Cell BE and its supporting logic, graphics processing and main memory devices. The PLAYSTATION 3's breathtaking graphics performance, including high-end 1080p video output, is delivered by the RSX Reality Synthesizer. Meanwhile, the South Bridge chip is responsible for interface and control of PLAYSTATION 3's rich provisioning of storage and communications technologies including Blu-ray™ Disc player, 40 or 60GB Hard drive, 802.11b/g WiFiTM, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and Bluetooth® 2.0.

XDR™Memory Architecture and FlexIO™ Processor Bus Unleash the Power of the Cell Broadband Engine&trade

The Cell BE employs an architectural strategy of extremely high-bandwidth access to main memory in lieu of large on-chip memory cache. The XDR memory controller interface (XIO) on the Cell BE is 72 bits-wide and is capable of operating at 3.2Ghz data rates providing 25.6 GB/s of total memory bandwidth. Four 512Mb XDR DRAM devices provide for 256MB of high-performance main memory for the Cell BE.
Learn more about the XDR memory architecture.

The Cell BE employs a similar strategy of extremely high-bandwidth connections to companion chips to achieve unprecedented levels of performance. Rambus' FlexIO processor bus provides the high-bandwidth connectivity between the Cell BE and the RSX and South Bridge chips. In the PLAYSTATION 3, the FlexIO interfaces connecting the Cell BE to its companion chips provide an aggregate bandwidth of 40 GB/s.