At €629 the PlayStation 3 (PS3) may be the most expensive games console in Ireland, but Sony justifies the price by what is contained in this powerful computer which masquerades as a humble games console.

Central to the gaming experience of the PS3 is the cell broadband engine, a unique multicore processor that has specialised high-performance processors designed to boost multimedia applications. It was co-designed by IBM and Toshiba and academic researchers are now looking at how it could be deployed for demanding computing tasks.

Researchers at DCU recently published a paper on how the PS3 could be used to speed up encryption on the internet.

Dr Michael Scott and Neil Costigan recorded a 700 per cent improvement in encryption performance and concluded that if such specialised multicore processors were widely used, always-on encryption could be possible.