Verified answer

The PS3 has the one Power PC-based core, plus 8 "SPEs" (Stream Processing Engines). Those are special purpose cores, as opposed to the PowerPC core, which is general purpose. One of those is disabled to improve Sony's production yields, so the PS3 has 1+7 cores.

For comparison, the X360 has three PowerPC-based general purpose cores running at 3.2GHz.

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