Cell Broadband Engine Architecture and its first implementation—A performance view

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor is the first implementation of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. In addition to use of the Cell/B.E. processor in the Sony Computer Entertainment PLAYSTATION 3 system, there is much interest in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIBM journal of research and development Vol. 51; no. 5; pp. 559 - 572
Main Authors Chen, T, Raghavan, R, Dale, J N, Iwata, E
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Armonk International Business Machines Corporation 01.09.2007
Subjects
Comparative studies
Computer architecture
Computer programming
Electronics industry
Microprocessors
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Summary:The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor is the first implementation of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. In addition to use of the Cell/B.E. processor in the Sony Computer Entertainment PLAYSTATION 3 system, there is much interest in using it for workstations, media-rich electronics devices, and video and image processing systems. The Cell/B.E. processor includes one PowerPC processor element (PPE) and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs). The CBEA is designed to be well suited for a wide variety of programming models, and it allows for partitioning of work between the PPE and the eight SPEs. In this paper we show that the Cell/B.E. processor can outperform other modern processors by approximately an order of magnitude and by even more in some cases.
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ISSN:0018-8646
0018-8646
2151-8556
DOI:10.1147/rd.515.0559