Nothing has created more media hype and anticipation than the next generation of gaming consoles from Microsoft (Xbox 360) and Sony (PlayStation 3). At the recently concluded E3 tradeshow, both of these devices were showcased to the audience and amazing promises were made to potential buyers.

Unlike most times however, this time there were solid facts behind the marketing hoopla and it seems both Sony and Microsoft have what it takes to truly bring powerful gaming consoles. The advancements in the hardware inside these consoles are nothing short of path breaking. We take a look below the bonnet and check out what makes these consoles tick.

The Cell Processor

This is deemed to be the future of computing. The basics of a cell processor aren’t too difficult to understand. What is difficult to understand is, why we didn’t think of this earlier?

The processor has been jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba (we will refer to them as IST throughout the article) and is touted to have cores operating in excess of 4GHz. Now, that should teach something to Intel and AMD as these were the pioneers of the GHz race, and IST came from nowhere and broke the 4GHz barrier. (Remember that the fastest Intel processor is still at 3.8GHz and AMD’s FX55 runs at 2.6GHz.

To give a very basic idea of how Cell works, consider this example, if you need to solve a complex problem, you can do it in two ways, you either call a super genius with an IQ of 200 or you call three lesser geniuses with an IQ of 140 each, and as the saying goes, three heads are better than one. Needless to say, it’ll not only perform better, but it’ll be efficient at the same time.

So, how did they manage to create the Cell? Surprisingly, they did it by making our processor cores simpler. The Cell processor is only a 2-issue core, which means that it can process only two instructions at one time; compare that to the Athlon 64 chips with 3-issue cores. And as you can see, the Cell processor is a much more simplified chip, and therefore has slightly limited capabilities.

The obvious question is why? Why make something simpler when millions of dollars were spent in making it complex in the first place?

The answer is obviously performance.

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