By optimizing control-plane and data-plane processors individually, the Cell Broadband Engine alleviates the problems posed by the power, memory, and frequency limitations.
The net result is a processor that, at the power budget of a conventional PC processor, can provide approximately ten-fold the peak performance of a conventional processor. Of course, actual application performance varies. Some applications may benefit little from the SPEs, whereas others show a performance increase well in excess of ten-fold. In general, compute-intensive applications that use 32-bit or smaller data formats (such as single-precision floating-point and integer) are excellent candidates for the Cell Broadband Engine.