As was witnessed in their demonstrations at GDC, Sony is planning to have an Operating System running constantly in the background, just like one witnesses when using the Xbox360 OS (aka Dashboard). They plan to have a "Blade" like pane that can appear out of the right hand side of the screen for viewing and participating in activities that the OS enables.

This include but are not limited to,
- Multi-User Voice Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Multi-User Video Chat across all games, even outside of the games own UI
- Notifications and messaging to be sent between users regardless of the games they are playing

Like the Xbox360, this all comes at a cost,
- 32mb of the 256mb of available GDDR3 memory off the RSX chip
- 64mb of the 256mb of available XDR memory off the Cell CPU
- 1 SPE of 7 constantly reserved
- 1 SPE of 7 able to be "taken" by the OS at a moments notice (games have to give it up if requested)

In the case of the PS3 this equates to 25% of the available Cores on the CPU and 18.75% of the available RAM in the system. Balancing these out, one could argue that Sony has removed a total of 23% of the available system power in the PS3 for these features as well as others that are not mentioned here or will be added in future updates to the PS3 Operation System.

The 1 SPE that can be taken away, by the system, from the games at a moments notice could be for the purposes of rendering the Blade and decoding and presenting the multiple video sources and other content onto the Blade when it appears to the user. This will have minimal to no impact on the ability of single player games to utilize the SPE, though it will likely add complications during development of games for the system. The main impact would be in Online Multiplayer games that do not have a pause option available and thus will have increased difficulty in relinquishing the SPE.