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Cell (processor)

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The Cell is a system-on-a-chip integrated circuit being developed by Toshiba, IBM, and Sony. The Cell chip is intended to be scalable from handheld devices to mainframe computers by utilizing parallel processing. Sony plans to use the chip in their PlayStation 3 game console.

The "normal" version of Cell (i.e. non-PDA, the Workstation or PS3 version), consists of one "Processing Element" or "PE", and eight "Attached Processing Units" or "APUs". The PE, said to be based on the Power(tm) Architecture by IBM, is a kind of "traffic cop" for the underlying APUs. The APUs are the real computational power of the chip. Each APU is a 128-bit processor with a 1024-bit external bus. Each APU is expected to give 32 GFLOPS of performance, thereby giving the entire Processing Unit 256 GFLOPS of performance. Cell allows for multiple processing units to be put onto one die, and the patent showed four on one die, called the "Broadband Engine", giving over 1 Teraflop of theoretical performance. Real-world performance would be less. It is unclear how many processing units will be incorporated into either the PlayStation 3 or Workstations.

Early versions of Cell are expected to clock at 4.8 GHz, according to paper abstracts presented for the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) to be held in February 2005. According to Sony, the chips are in early production, for workstations, using IBM's 90 nanometre process, with later production (most likely for PlayStation 3) using Sony's 65-nm process, at their Nagasaki fabrication plant.

There will be several versions of the Cell chip with varying number of processing units depending on the device where the chip is used. The companies designing the chip have claimed that by scaling the number of units in the chip, as well as the number of PEs on a single die, or by linking multiple chips to each other via network or memory bus, supercomputer-like performance can be made available in consumer devices.


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