The PS3's Cell is more powerful than Intel's current processors, according to a developer

There CPU Cell of the PS3 it's even more powerful than any current Intel desktop processor according to Guerrilla Games co-director and technical director, Michiel van der Leeuw.

“Even the current desktop chips, the fastest Intel CPUs you can buy today, they are not as powerful as the PS3 CPU Cell, but it is very difficult to make the most of it. I think it was ahead of its time, because it worked similarly to today's GPUs, but perhaps it was not well balanced and was too difficult to use. It exaggerated a bit in power and not in usability, but she was decidedly visionary”Said van der Leeuw in a recent interview with GameInformer.

The highly parallel computing architecture forced the developers to rewrite the code to properly exploit the different cores, and for this the Cell gave several headaches at software houses. The Cell processor was (and apparently still is) very powerful, but harnessing its power required a convoluted, complex and often frustrating process, which took really too long.

The developers had to specifically optimize their games for the PS3 to take full advantage of the potential of the CPU Cell, which few games actually did. “The PlayStation 3 had enormous power but exploiting it and extracting its performance was difficult because you had all those SPUs (Synergistic Processor Unit) and the power was not easy to unlock. A lot of code had to be written for special cases. We got there, but it took a long time. And we needed a team that was skilled enough to do it, “concluded van der Leeuw.

The experience with the Cell led Sony to back down with the next console. PS4 was born to facilitate development. The move to x86 architecture has laid the foundation for decades of games that can scale between PC, Xbox and PS4 without requiring much extra work.

Although the APU based on PS4's AMD Jaguar architecture is not the most powerful, it is much simpler to use than the Cell. Sony's PlayStation 5 will also use an AMD custom x86 processor, based on the latest Zen 2 architecture, and we expect that the use of x86 architecture continues with future PlayStations.