The Sony PS3 was released 17 years ago and was the first gaming console to support Blu-ray, feature extensive online features, and enhance the CellBroadband engine. Now, according to a Bloomberg report, the development cost of the PS3 processor was as high as $1.7 billion, making the first few years of the PS3 very difficult for Sony.
The processor was jointly developed by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba, and it's a huge investment considering the PS3 is nowhere near Sony's best-selling console and the Cell architecture isn't booming.
This collaboration is certainly ambitious, with Sony hoping to use Cell to power a variety of hardware, including TVs, cameras, and more. But despite significant investment, the CellBroadband engine failed to achieve this goal.
This has also become the main reason why the PS3 has an initial price of $600, and because the CPU is too difficult to use, it makes the Xbox 360 more suitable for third-party development teams.
Sony later switched to using the more ideal x86 architecture processors made by AMD for the PS4, and the APU currently used by the PS5 is a Ryzen series processor, which has many similarities with its PC counterparts, which eliminates the research and development costs involved in creating completely new technologies such as the CellBroadband engine.