Introducing the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell Processor

By Jon "Hannibal" Stokes

Monday, February 07, 2005
Introduction

The Cell processor consists of a general-purpose POWERPC processor core connected to eight special-purpose DSP cores. These DSP cores, which IBM calls "synergistic processing elements" (SPE), but I'm going to call "SIMD processing elements" (SPE) because "synergy" is a dumb word, are really the heart of the entire Cell concept. IBM introduced the basic architecture of the SPE today, and they're going to introduce the overall architecture of the complete Cell system in a session tomorrow morning.

In this brief overview, I'm first going to talk in some general terms about the Cell approach — what it is, what it's like, what's behind it, etc. — before doing an information dump at the end of the article for more technical readers to chew on and debate. Once the conference is over and I get back to Chicago and get settled in, I'll do some more comprehensive

coverage of the Cell.