Cell BE

E773454

Cell BE is a high-performance microprocessor architecture co-developed by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba, best known for powering the PlayStation 3 and for its use in parallel computing applications.

Jump to: Statements Referenced by

Statements (53)

Predicate Object
instanceOf heterogeneous multi-core processor
microprocessor architecture
reduced instruction set computing processor
alsoKnownAs Cell Broadband Engine NERFINISHED
architectureType Power Architecture based
heterogeneous computing architecture
cache L2 cache on Power Processing Element
clockSpeed 3.2 GHz (typical)
coreCount 1 Power Processing Element core
7 Synergistic Processing Element cores (typical PS3 configuration)
8 Synergistic Processing Element cores (theoretical maximum)
countryOfOrigin Japan
United States of America
surface form: United States
designGoal high floating-point performance
low power consumption relative to performance
media and streaming workloads
developer IBM
Sony NERFINISHED
Toshiba NERFINISHED
firstAnnouncementDate 2001
firstCommercialUseDate 2006
firstCommercialUseIn PlayStation 3 GENERATED
hasComponent Element Interconnect Bus
I/O controller
Memory Interface Controller
Power Processing Element NERFINISHED
Synergistic Processing Element NERFINISHED
influenced later heterogeneous CPU-GPU computing models
instructionSetArchitecture PowerPC NERFINISHED
interconnectType high-bandwidth Element Interconnect Bus NERFINISHED
manufacturingProcess 45 nm (some implementations)
65 nm (later versions)
90 nm (initial versions)
memoryModel local store for each Synergistic Processing Element
notableFeature explicit DMA-based memory transfers
heterogeneous cores with separate local stores
high peak floating-point throughput
notableUse IBM BladeCenter QS20 NERFINISHED
IBM BladeCenter QS21 NERFINISHED
IBM BladeCenter QS22 NERFINISHED
PlayStation 3 NERFINISHED
Roadrunner supercomputer NERFINISHED
Toshiba SpursEngine coprocessor NERFINISHED
purpose game console processing
high-performance computing
supports SIMD operations
parallel computing
vector processing
usedIn media encoding and decoding
scientific computing applications
signal processing applications
supercomputing clusters
wordSize 64-bit

Referenced by (1)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.