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The "Cell" processor's claim to fame is that it will serve as the processor powering Sony Computer Entertainment's next-generation entertainment console, the PlayStation 3. However, the PowerPC-derived, 64-bit multicore chip is also designed to be scalable, allowing it to be used in products from consumer-electronic devices to workstations and some servers.

IBM, for example, plans to use it to power a Cell-based workstation, first disclosed in May and now up and running in trial form. A one-rack Cell processor-based workstation will reach a performance of 16 teraflops or trillions of floating point calculations per second, IBM said. IBM did not say whether or not the Cell workstation that was "powered on" used an early Cell chip, or a simulation running on some other hardware.

In addition to the PS3, Sony plans to launch home servers for broadband content as well as high-definition televisions powered by Cell in 2006. Toshiba also said it expects HDTVs powered by the Cell chip to launch in 2006.

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So Power PC derived .....leaves your question unanswered.

Forum mtem

From:

Rajesh Jain's Weblog on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets

IBM's Cell

WSJ writes about IBM's new chip for the home-entertainment market:

Sony and IBM are expected to announce that next year they will start selling the first Cell-based product -- a high-performance workstation designed for use by videogame designers and Hollywood animation houses. Pricing and marketing plans haven't been determined. IBM said a version of the workstation mounted in a rack with multiple Cell processors will be able to perform 16 trillion mathematical operations a second. That speed would theoretically make it faster than all but a dozen of the world's supercomputers, although much of its power is dedicated to graphics processing rather than to general-purpose computing.
Tom Starnes, an analyst with Gartner Inc., who has been briefed on the chip, said that "they're hinting at stuff that is indeed very impressive." While the processing power in videogames "all gets used by 12-year-old boys," Cell also is designed to handle video streams from cable and satellite systems, decompressing encoded information and expanding it for display on big, high-definition, plasma screens.
Analysts said the processor might be able to reorient digitized video as it is received to provide views from above or an end-zone view. In other applications, the processing power of Cell might permit a viewer to take a TV character and place him in a videogame, or interact with a commercial to see how a dress would look on an image of herself stored in the system.

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IBM, Sony to detail 'Cell' PS3 CPU February 2005>
By Tony Smith
Published Monday 29th November 2004 11:17 GMT

IBM, Sony and Toshiba - the three companies behind the 'Cell' microprocessor - will formally detail the chip's workings at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) on 6 February 2005, the trio said today.
IBM and Sony also said they were now ready to announce the promised Cell-based workstation, which should enable software developers to begin coding for the PlayStation 3, itself set to be based on the new chip.
The partners describe Cell as a 64-bit POWER-based "multi-core system" for computers and next-generation digital home appliances. Crucially, each core can run a single operating system, or run their own OS independently of the others. OS options include real-time support.
With the confirmation that Cell is indeed derived from IBM's POWER architecture, and given they way the chip's designers discuss it more in terms of a general-purpose CPU than the more console-oriented Emotion Engine of the PS2, it's clearly going to raise the possibility that the part may be of interest to Apple.
And since IBM is also working on the CPU for Xbox 2/Xbox Next, there's the chance of a certain degree of software compatibility there too, though clearly the use of different high-level APIs will limit games and application portability.
The chip's makers note that Cell is not only a multi-core architecture - like the anticipated 'Antares' PowerPC 970MP - but multi-threaded too, though it's not yet clear whether support for multiple threads takes places within each core level, HyperThreading-style, or Sony and co. are simply talking about spreading threads across cores. IBM's POWER 5 architecture supports simultaneous multi-threading, so it seems likely Cell will too.
IBM and Sony also talk about big memory and I/O bandwidth - no great surprise there, given it's a 64-bit processor and what IBM has demonstrated with existing POWER and PowerPC processors. More interesting is the integration of a security sub-system. The companies don't go into any detail, but it sounds not unlike VIA's PadLock technology with its hardware random number generator. Mention is made of "high-level media processing", which could be a reference to AltiVec, the PowerPC SIMD engine.
There's also the suggestion that Cell will use a SpeedStep-style power conservation technology, allowing the chip to reduced its clock frequency. IBM's 90nm PowerPC 970 already has something along these lines.
Contrary to past speculation that Cell would ship at 65nm, its makers today said it will debut as a 90nm part using IBM's SOI technology.
As for the Cell-based workstation, it's clearly only at the prototype stage, IBM and Sony having come up with an "experimental model".
Still, it packs 2 teraflops into a standard (presumably) rackmount box, apparently, with what sounds like multiple, multi-core chips operating as a kind of cluster-in-a-box configuration. ®
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