About Cell/B.E.
Cell/B.E. processor is a multi-core processor jointly developed by SONY, TOSHIBA, and IBM. It is famous for being the main processor of PLAYSTATION®3, but it is also a general-purpose processor designed to be embedded in products or in servers.
Features
Cell/B.E. Design Concept
As the demand for real-time interactive processing placed on multimedia contents has increased,
Cell/B.E. is developed as a "supercomputer on a chip" in this broadband era and improves power performance ration.
Cell/B.E. is desiged for wide ranging applications from digital homes to HPC to distributed computing.
Heterogeneous (asymmetrical) multi-core processor
A processor with two or more cores is called a multi-core but Cell is a heterogeneous multi-core whichi has a number of different configuration cores.
*Heterogeneous: different in kind,unlike.Pentium and Athlon series are homogeneous processors (as of January 2008)
*Core: A combination of a computational unit, register, data circuit and others necessary for CPU operation.
| Homogeneous multi-core processor |
Heterogeneous multi-core processor |
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| Multiple cores of same type in one CPU |
Multiple cores of different type in one CPU |
9 cores on 1 chip
Typical Cell structure is 1 + N.
- One processor for control : PPE (PowerPC Processor Element)
The PPE is the main processor of the Cell/B.E., and is responsible for running the operating system.
- N processors for arithmetic : SPE (Synergistic Processor Element)
The SPE is the processor optimised for media processing.
The 90nm Cell/B.E. 3.2GHz chip is currently configured to have 1 PPE and 8 SPEs.
PS3 programs can use 6.
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