Probably not all of you are familiar with ’Cell’ and that’s in now way your fault since the information regarding the architecture is somewhat slim.
The three giants that support the development of ’Cell’ are Sony, IBM and Toshiba, which forms The SIT Group. The rumored processor architecture that Cell has become over the past few years are probably mainly known for it’s possible appearance in Sony’s upcoming gaming console PlayStation 3. A console that will meat the toughest possible opposition from Microsoft with their Xbox2.
Their have been many loosely based discussions regarding PlayStation3 and its Cell-architecture and in the end the only thing we can conclude is that it will be an incredibly powerful system.
The SIT-group still hasn’t released any details regarding the Cell-architecture officially, but to protect their precious they’ve applied for patents as usual.
These patents are far from easy to understand, but the huge interest regarding the Cell-architecture has made some people take the task upon themselves to ”translate” the SIT-groups patents to something that almost any mortal can understand.
One of the people that has managed to get some useful information from the patents is Nicholas Blachford which has written a rather extensive article regarding the Cell-processor’s architecture.
That the Cell-architecture is something above average seems to be the biggest understatement of the year and if only half of what he says is accurate the Cell-processor looks to leave a huge mark in history.
Except for the Cell-processor’s construction he compares it to today’s x86-architecture, in other words AMD and Intel’s PC-processors.
It’s a bit hard to tell you anything more specific about the Cell-processor in a rather small news post but according to him the PC-market will change radically if the SIT-group determines to introduce the Cell-architecture on the PC-market.
”The first Cell based desktop computer will be the fastest desktop computer in the industry by a very large margin. Even high end multi-core x86s will not get close. Companies who produce microprocessors or DSPs are going to have a very hard time fighting the power a Cell will deliver. We have never seen a leap in performance like this before and I don’t expect we’ll ever see one again, It’ll send shock-waves through the entire industry and we’ll see big changes as a result.”
The prominent future that Nicholas Blachford tells us of in his article are of course not to be taken literally, but it is quite clear that Sony has something quite impressive going on with their PlayStation3 console, that very much can have huge repercussions on the whole electronics industry.
It’s with butterflies in your stumach that you read through this article and even you do take everything with a pinch of salt the future looks very, very bright.
You can read the entire article at Blachford.info
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