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Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.〔 It was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by Sony as approaching US$400 million.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Cell Designer talks about PS3 and IBM Cell Processors )〕 Cell is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated ''CBEA'' in full or ''Cell BE'' in part. The first major commercial application of Cell was in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. Mercury Computer Systems has a dual Cell server, a dual Cell blade configuration, a rugged computer, and a PCI Express accelerator board available in different stages of production. Toshiba had announced plans to incorporate Cell in high definition television sets, but seems to have abandoned the idea. Exotic features such as the XDR memory subsystem and coherent Element Interconnect Bus (EIB) interconnect appear to position Cell for future applications in the supercomputing space to exploit the Cell processor's prowess in floating point kernels. The Cell architecture includes a memory coherence architecture that emphasizes power efficiency, prioritizes bandwidth over low latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a Linux-based development platform to help developers program for Cell chips. The architecture will not be widely used unless it is adopted by the software development community. However, Cell's strengths may make it useful for scientific computing regardless of its mainstream success. ==History== In mid-2000, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba Corporation, and IBM formed an alliance known as "STI" to design and manufacture the processor.〔Krewell, Kevin (February 14, 2005). "Cell Moves Into the Limelight". ''Microprocessor Report''.〕 The STI Design Center opened in March 2001. The Cell was designed over a period of four years, using enhanced versions of the design tools for the POWER4 processor. Over 400 engineers from the three companies worked together in Austin, with critical support from eleven of IBM's design centers.〔During this period, IBM filed many patents pertaining to the Cell architecture, manufacturing process, and software environment. An early patent version of the Broadband Engine was shown to be a chip package comprising four "Processing Elements", which was the patent's description for what is now known as the ''Power Processing Element'' (PPE). Each Processing Element contained 8 ''APUs'', which are now referred to as SPEs on the current Broadband Engine chip. This chip package was widely regarded to run at a clock speed of 4 GHz and with 32 APUs providing 32 gigaFLOPS each, the Broadband Engine was shown to have 1 teraFLOPS of raw computing power. This design was fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process.〔 In March 2007, IBM announced that the 65 nm version of Cell BE is in production at its plant (at the time, now GlobalFoundries') in East Fishkill, New York.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 url=http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20070312121941.html )〕 Bandai Namco Entertainment used the cell processor for their 357 arcade board as well as the subsequent 369. In February 2008, IBM announced that it will begin to fabricate Cell processors with the 45 nm process. In May 2008, IBM introduced the high-performance double-precision floating-point version of the Cell processor, the PowerXCell 8i,〔(【引用サイトリンク】 url=http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24180.wss )〕 at the 65 nm feature size. In May 2008, an Opteron- and PowerXCell 8i-based supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner system, became the world's first system to achieve one petaFLOPS, and was the fastest computer in the world until third quarter 2009. The world's three most energy efficient supercomputers, as represented by the Green500 list, are similarly based on the PowerXCell 8i. The 45 nm Cell processor was introduced in concert with Sony's PlayStation 3 Slim in August 2009. By November 2009 IBM had discontinued the development of a Cell processor with 32 APUs〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Will Roadrunner Be the Cell's Last Hurrah? )〕 but was still developing other Cell products. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cell (microprocessor)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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