http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7078
"SOURCES SAID that the architecture of the Sony Playstation3 is patently clear when you've found the US patent that it filed September 26th last year.
A reliable source close to Sony's plans explained the way the Playstation3 works to the INQUIRER.
He said that the computers are made of cells, each one containing a CPU, which will probably be a PowerPC, and eight APUs (vectorial processors) each with 128K of memory.
It will run at 4GHz, producing a not inconsiderable 256Gflops, with the cells connected to the central 64MB memory through a switched 1024 bit bus.
It's still not clear how many of these "cells" will be used in the Playstation3, but Sony reckoned some time ago it could be as many as one teraflops, probably making it a four cell architecture.
Optical links – perhaps even FireWire optical links – could be used to share computing power.
The Playstation3 architecture is similar to the Playstation 2 but with some improvements, such as a larger number of VPUs, each with more memory. The operating system, too, is much improved.
But Playstations will still be very complex to program well, although its just as well that Sony doesn't want to take the Microsoft DirectX route."
I'm no tech genious but it looks like the PS3 WILL be harder to program for opposed to the Xbox.
The key element is that manufacturing costs in the long run will be a lot less for the custom chip to be found in the PS3. So maybe Sony is looking into beating Microsoft price wise if they ever "catch up" with PS3 in terms of sales.
Also looks like the philoshophy of the console remains the same... huge bandwidths to lessen the need for the amount of memory. Although I have my doubts about the effeciasy, but let's not ofret that ALL of the gaming market is concentrating on the PS2... and as we see bandwiths don't really save the console.