A question on the cell processor

[dbgtz]

This document I was reading at college said it had 8 cores, but I always remembered it being 1 core with 7 SPEs (or something like that), but 1 was used for security or something. Which is it?

[scottish]

It has one PPE, and 8 SPEs, one is used for OS one is used for test, so games can use 6.

---------- Post added 05-11-2011 at 08:58 PM ----------

"To increase fabrication yields, Sony ships PlayStation 3 Cell processors with only seven working SPEs. And from those seven, one SPE will be used by the operating system for various tasks, This leaves six SPEs and 1 PPE for game programmers to use."

[N!ck]

They have 8, but only use 7 since it was rare at first to create a perfectly working one on all 8 cores so it means the percentage that they binned is much lower if the requirement is only 7/8 working CPU cores rather than 8/8.

Some of the tri-core AMD CPUs were acutally quad cores which came out of production with only 3 working cores.