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Cell Processor

Introduction

''Cell'' is a microprocessor jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. The Cell architecture is intended to be scalable through the use of vector processing. The first major commercial application of Cell is in Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 game console. In 2000, Sony Inc., Toshiba Corp., and IBM formed an alliance ("STI") to design and build the processor. The STI Design Center in Austin, Texas opened in March 2001. The Cell was designed over a period of four years, using enhanced versions of the design tools for the POWER4 processor. Over 400 engineers from the three companies worked together in Austin, with critical support from eleven of IBM's design centers.

Although it's been primarily touted as the technology for the PlayStation 3, Cell is designed for much more. Sony and Toshiba, both being major electronics manufacturers buy in all manner of different components. One of the reasons for Cell's development is they want to save costs by building their own components. Next generation consumer technologies such as Blue-ray, HDTV, HD Camcorders and of course the PS3 will all require a very high level of computing power and they are going to need the chips to provide it. Cell will be used for all of these and more. IBM will also be using the chips in servers. The partners can also sell the chips to 3rd party manufacturers.

The Cell architecture is like nothing we have ever seen in commodity microprocessors, it is closer in design to multiprocessor vector supercomputers. The Cell developers have taken this kind of technology and for the first time are bringing it to your home. The aim is produce a low cost system with a massive increase in compute performance over existing systems. Putting such an architecture on a single chip is a huge, complex project, no other manufacturer appears to have even attempted to do anything this ambitious to date.

It is an architecture for high performance distributed computing. It is comprised of...