Application development for the Cell processor
Cell Culture
© Dmitry Sunagatov, Fotolia
The Cell architecPIture is finding its way into a vast range of computer systems – from huge supercomputers to inauspicious Playstation game consoles. We'll show you around the Cell and take a look at a sample Cell application.
Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM started developing the innovative Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) around 2001. The Cell architecture specializes in efficient processing of large data streams, such as the streams that occur in multimedia applications or computer games. The first implementation of the Cell architecture is the Cell Broadband Engine, also known as the Cell processor, which dates back to 2005 (Figure 1). Since it was introduced as the processor for the Sony PlayStation 3, the Cell CPU has attracted much attention. Although the Playstation (Figure 2) is certainly the most widespread application of the Cell architecture, the most spectacular application has to be the Roadrunner (Figure 3), which uses more than 12,000 Cell processors [1].
© IBM
Cell blades are available from both IBM and Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury has even built a PCI Express card with a full-fledged Cell processor computer. Toshiba uses a variant of the Cell processor in its Qosmio notebooks.
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