Cell Processor

Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by a Sony, Toshiba, and IBM alliance known as STI.

Cell is a shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part. Cell combines a general-purpose POWER-architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.

The major commercial application of Cell is in Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 game console which is slated to launch in November 2006. It will also become available in a blade configuration from Mercury Computer Systems. Toshiba has announced plans to incorporate Cell in high definition television sets. Exotic features such as the XDR memory subsystem and coherent EIB interconnect appear to position Cell for future applications in the supercomputing space to exploit the Cell processor's prowess in floating point kernels.

Up to Two-Billion calculations a second.

Sources:
--OPM (Official Playstation Magazine)
--Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)

Sony will use the cell processor in its next-gen console, the PS3

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