A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3

As much as the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) has a range of interesting features, its heart, the CELL processor is what the fuss is all about. CELL, a shorthand for CELL Broadband Engine Architecture, also abbreviated as CELL BE Architecture or CBEA, is a microprocessor jointly developed by the alliance of Sony, Toshiba and IBM, known as STI. The work started in 2000 at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas, and for more than four years involved around 400 engineers and consumed close to half a billion dollars. The initial goal was to outperform desktop systems, available at the time of completion of the design, by an order of magni- tude, through a dramatic increase in performance per chip area and per unit of power consumption. A quantum leap in performance would be achieved by abandoning the obsolete architectural model where performance relied on mechanisms like cache hierarchies and speculative execution, which those days brought diminishing returns in performance gains. Instead, the new architecture would rely on a heterogeneous multi-core design, with highly efficient data processors being at the heart. [via]

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