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The Cell Broadband Engine consists of a 3.2 GHz Power Processing Element (PPE) and seven Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE),<ref group=N2>You might see listings of eight SPEs, but that's because there are eight on the die; one of them is disabled to prevent the manufacturer from yielding too many bad units. Another SPE is reserved for the console's operating system.</ref> and the system contains 256 MBs of XDR DRAM main memory at 3.2 GHz and 256 MBs of GDDR3 video memory at 650 MHz for the Nvidia/SCEI RSX Reality Synthesizer GPU. The GPU ran at 500 MHz and has to communicate forth and back with both RAMs. The complexity of the SPEs bogged down the PlayStation 3 in multi-platform titles, as developers had to go through the process of learning the SPE architecture before they could use it. As a result, several developers decided against using the SPEs, and the consequence is that many multi-platform games ran with lower framerates or worse graphics compared to running those same games on the PS3's competitors.
The number of units sold worldwide was about the same as the Xbox 360. The PlayStation 3 initially included a feature called [[#OtherOS|OtherOS]],<ref group=N2>Which allowed the console to run many distributions of Linux and BSD in a separate partition as long as they supported PowerPC.</ref> but once it was removed shortly after the PS3 Slim model was released citing "security concerns", fail0verflow had a jailbreak detailed in 2010, giving way for [[PS3 Modding|modders to downgrade firmware on a specific version]] and install a custom firmware, something Sony would patch in newer updates until an exploit was released for 4.82. Emulation only started gaining traction in the late 2010s, as [[RPCS3]] had made strides in improving its largely HLE-based emulation. It has since become the emulator of choice.
==Emulators==
===OtherOS===
:[[Wikipedia:OtherOS]]
OtherOS is a feature of early versions of the PlayStation 3 video game console, allowing user installed software, such as many distributions of Linux or FreeBSDBSD in a separate partition as long as they supported PowerPC. The feature was removed since system firmware update 3.21, released on April 1, 2010. Software running in the OtherOS environment has access to 6 of the 7 SPEs. Sony implemented a hypervisor restricting access to the RSX. However either thru a security vulnerability before FW 2.10 or by using some form of OtherOS++ CFW full access to the RSX, and/or the seventh SPE and other system resources is possible. See [[Recommended_linux_distros#Wide_range_of_platforms_focused]] or [https://t2sde.org/hardware/console/Sony/PS3/ T2 SDE PS3 page] for more information.
*RPCS3 do not support PlayStation 3 OtherOS feature at the moment.[https://forums.rpcs3.net/post-230177.html][https://old.reddit.com/r/rpcs3/comments/8rps60/can_rpcs3_boot_linux_otheros/]
