The PS3's 3.2 GHz Cell processor, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba and IBM ("STI"), is an implementation to dynamically assign physical processor cores to do different types of work independently. It has a PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible 3.2 GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs), a seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to OS security, and an eighth disabled to improve production yields. The PPE, SPE's and other elements ("units") are connected via an Element Interconnect Bus which serves to connect all of the units in a ring-style bus. The PPE has a 512 KiB level 2 cache and one VMX vector unit. Each of the SPEs is a RISC processor with 128 128-bit SIMD GPRs and superscalar functions. Each SPE contains 256 KiB of non-cached memory (local storage, "LS") that is shared by program code and work data. SPEs may access more data in the main memory using DMA. The floating point performance of the whole system (CPU + GPU) is reported to be 2.18 TFLOPS[77]. PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 will ship with 256 MiB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.
I recall reading articles about how Iraq had sent agents out to the western world, buying up gaming consoles for just this reason: To use in their (non-existant) nuclear weapons program.
Mark
There's an enormous chasm between the theoretical numbers you posted and actual performance.
The Cell derives it's 204 GFLOPS from having a lot of processing cores, but those cores are very stripped down. There is a lot of very complex architecture in a modern AMD or Intel processor that is basically needed to prevent the processor from wasting it's clock cycles. The Cell's cores are much simpler, and aren't capable of using their clock cycles as efficiently in real world applications.
It's also not "business computing" that the Cell is poor at; it's general-purpose computing. All but one of the Cell's cores has a limited instruction set, and isn't capable of general purpose computing. Unless the Cell is doing the exact type of calculations that it was primarily designed to do, then it's not even in the same dimension of power as your average PC processor.
Also, with 256mb of RAM, the PS3 would have to be constantly read an write to the hard drive. Hard drive I/O is far slower that memory I/O, and will effectively bottleneck the system's performance.
The "PS3 is a powerful computer" is 100% Sony hype. Game developers have already worked with it, and it's not even close to being as powerful as it's being sold as.