Playstation 3 Performance (May 2007)

Lately I've been working on porting Geekbench 2 to the Playstation 3. While I'm hoping to release a version of Geekbench that takes advantage of the Cell processor, I thought I'd share some preliminary results that show how the Playstation 3 (and the Cell processor) performs when running code that's not optimized for the Cell processor.

Setup

Here's the configuration of the Playstation 3.

  • Playstation 3
    • Cell Processor @ 3.2 GHz
    • 256 MB XDR RAM
    • Fedora Core 6
    • PS3 Linux Addon v1.3 (25 April 2007)
      • Geekbench 2.0.3 (32-bit and 64-bit pre-release)

I'm reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each benchmark (where a score of 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz would receive). Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

Playstation 3
32-bit
956
 
Playstation 3
64-bit
912
 

Integer Performance

Playstation 3
32-bit
920
 
Playstation 3
64-bit
786
 

Floating Point Performance

Playstation 3
32-bit
702
 
Playstation 3
64-bit
696
 

Memory Performance

Playstation 3
32-bit
1568
 
Playstation 3
64-bit
1678
 

Stream Performance

Playstation 3
32-bit
749
 
Playstation 3
64-bit
583
 

Update: You can view the complete 32-bit and 64-bit Geekbench results on the Geekbench Browser.

Conclusions

It's clear that the Cell processor isn't all that impressive as a general-purpose CPU; if it's not executing code designed to run on the Cell processor, it's generally slower than a PowerPC G5 @ 1.6GHz (the baseline processor for Geekbench).

What remains to be seen is how the Playstation 3 performs when running code designed for the Cell processor; over the next few months I'm hoping to add Cell-specific optimizations to Geekbench that will exploit all the potential the Cell processor has to offer.


 
John Poole is the founder of Primate Labs and lives in Toronto, Ontario with his wife Deborah. You can find John on Twitter or .