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.