Cell processor unwrapped… kinda sorta
The STI group's (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) new Cell processor is generating some serious buzz in the chip community, and not just because it's supposed to crank out all sorts of nasty cycles—if you haven't been paying attention, it's supposedly going to be the heart of the PlayStation 3. But we all remember before how Sony promised us the PlayStation 2 would pump out a few times the amount of polygons it actually was able to, so it's to be taken with a rather large grain of salt as yet, but one man who goes by the name of Blachford (who may himself also require some salt) claims to have "interpreted" the patent application docs on the Cell. So what we, er, may know is that it's supposed to run in the 4.6GHz range, have 9 cores (one being a PowerPC G5-like CPU, with 8 other APUs—vector processors), and a crazy unheardof 1k 6.4Gbps bus. Okay, so, where to start.
[Via Joystiq]
