The Cell Processor Architecture

This talk will present the Cell processor, jointly developed by the STI (Sony-Toshiba-IBM) partnership. Cell is a non-homogeneous chip multiprocessor intended for general-purpose applications but with a particular emphasis on multimedia performance. The Cell processor combines a 64bit Power Architecture(TM) core with 8 Synergistic Processors. In many cases, it delivers more than an order of magnitude more performance than conventional PC processors. Cell achieves this performance and power efficiency improvement by a new division of labor between the Power core and the Synergistic Processors. Cell allows for a wide variety of programming models, a selection of which will be presented in this talk. We will end the talk by discussing some applications that seem to fit the Cell processor particularly well, and by indicating areas of further exploration.