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by asmman1 4569 days ago
What was used before? gcc?
2 comments

The PS3 uses both SNC and GCC (4.1). The developer has a choice of using SNC or GCC when generating code for the PPU -- the general purpose processor on the PS3 -- but only GCC is available when building code for the SPUs.

SNC is (was?) a great compiler. The code it generated was faster and significantly smaller than that generated by GCC, while being much faster at building to boot. Later versions of SNC added limited C++11 support as well.

Slide 13. TL;DR: From Sony, yes - as well as an independent third party toolchain.
That is now a first-party toolchain after acquisition.