The amount of money being spent on this project is vast, two 65nm chip fabrication facilities are being built at billions each and Sony has paid IBM hundreds of millions to set up a production line in Fishkill. Then there’s a few hundred million on development - all before a single chip rolls of the production lines.

This is a 9 core processor, one of these cores is something similar to a PowerPC G5 and acts as a controller. The remaining 8 cores are called APUs and these are very high performance vector processors. Each APU contains it’s own block of high speed RAM and is capable of 32 GigaFlops (32bit). The APUs are independent processors and can act alone or can be set up to process a stream of data with different APUs working on different stages. This ability to act as a “stream processor” gives access to the full processing power of a Cell which is more than 10 times higher than even the fastest desktop processors.

Cells are specifically designed to work together. While they can be directly connected via the high speed interconnects they can also be connected in other ways or distributed over a network. The Cells are not gaming or computer specific, they can be in anything from PDAs to TVs and all can be used to effectively act as a single system.

If over clocked sufficiently (over 3.0GHz) and using some very optimised code (SSE assembly), 5 dual core Opterons directly connected via HyperTransport should be able to achieve a similar level of performance in stream processing as a single Cell - Admittedly, this is purely theoretical and it depends on the Cell achieving it’s performance goals and a “perfect” application being used, it does however demonstrate the sort of processing capability the Cell has.

The PlayStation 3 is expected to have 4 Cells.

Cell has the power and it will be cheap. But can it challenge the PC without software? The answer to this question would have been simple once, but PC market has changed over time and for a number of reasons Cell is now a threat:

The first reason is Linux. Linux has shown that alternative operating systems can break into the PC software market against Windows, the big difference with Linux though is that it is cross platform. If the software you need runs on linux, switching hardware platforms is no problem as much of the software will still run on different CPUs.

The second reason is cost, other platforms have often used expensive custom components and have been made in smaller numbers. This has put their cost above that of PCs, putting them at immediate disadvantage. Cell may be expensive initially but once Sony and Toshiba’s fabs ramp up it will be manufactured in massive volumes forcing the prices down, the fact it’s going into the PS3 and TVs is an obvious help for getting the massive volumes that will be required.

The third reason is power, the vast majority of PCs these don’t need the power they provide, Cell will only accentuate this because it will be able to off load most of the intensive stuff to the APUs. What this means is that if you do need to run a specific piece of software you can emulate it and you might not even notice the difference.

Cell represents the largest threat the PC has ever faced. The PC can’t use it’s traditional advantage of software because the Cell can run the same software. It can’t get an advantage in price or volume as Cell will also be made in huge volumes. Lastly it can’t compete on the basis of Cell being proprietary because it’s being made be a set of companies and they can sell to anyone. x86 is no less propriety than Cell. It looks like the PC may have finally met it’s match.

To sum up there’s really only one way of saying it: