The strength of the PS3 doesn't lie with the PS3 core, but rather with the ring of SPEs that the Cell processor has. These allow insanely efficient data proces

The strength of the PS3 doesn't lie with the PS3 core, but rather with the ring of SPEs that the Cell processor has. These allow insanely efficient data processing, where the PPC chip really doesn't do a whole lot except for managing logic and state. However, nothing under OtherOS used the SPEs really, and it had no access to the GPU, so the speed came down to the in-order PPC core.