Sony Computer Entertainment, IBM and Toshiba held a press conference in downtown San Francisco this morning to unveil more details on their collaborative Cell processor. While there are still a few details and bits of information that the three companies are keeping mum about for the moment, they did reveal and confirm plenty of specs that had been only rumors and guesses for some time now.
For those of you who like reading numbers more than words, here are some raw specs (which we'll discuss below):
Each Cell processor contains 8 Synergistic Processing Units and a single 64-bit Power Architecture Unit (All are RISC designs with SIMD)
Operates at >4GHz and capable of >256GFLOPS
256KB Local Storage per SPU and 512KB L2 Cache (2.5MB total)
128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor
High-speed internal element interconnect performing at 96B/cycle
234 million transistors
Prototype die size of 221mm^2
Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology
Cell microprocessor is a multi-core processor that's designed to handle a large number of tasks simultaneously. The first known major use of the Cell processor will be Sony's next-generation gaming machine, which we'll refer to as PlayStation 3 for the time being (Sony has yet to announce its official name, but you can bet on PS3).
The Cell processor that was discussed at the press conference is made up of 9 separate cores. There is a single 64-bit Power Processing Element (or Power Architecture Core) and 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The Power Processor Element (PPE) can best be thought of as a variation of a Power PC processor, though its an entirely new design, intending on "overseeing" the work of the whole Cell processor. The PPE sends off various instructions to the 8 SPEs which can then work autonomously.
Sony, IBM and Toshiba said that they have ran Cell processors at "greater than 4GHz", though they wouldn't name an exact speed. Performance of the processor is said to be in excess of 256GFLOPS (256 billion floating-point operations per second). That's an extremely large number, the sort that you normally throw around when you're talking about arrays of multiple processors or even supercomputers. Measuring FLOPS can be done in a few different ways, but as a comparable number the highest you could get from a fast Pentium 4 these days is somewhere in the upper 20's
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See the following sites for the complete preview.
IGN PS2
GameSpy
