The Sony PlayStation 3 Cell Chip

The PlayStation 3's CPU is a revolutionary new chip codenamed "Cell�. It is being developed by an alliance between Sony, Toshiba and IBM. The system will use chip-to-chip interface technology and memory technology from the Rambus group.

Cell's first public demonstration has been announced for the 2005 E³ conference, while the first technical details were released at the February 2005 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). Patent applications have also given us valuable information regarding the Cell chip’s architecture.

The CPU's supposed distributed processing features have lead to speculation that many items in the home, with differing numbers of Cell chips, can pool their power.

Early versions of the chip will be 90-nm, with a change to a 65-nm process, if cost and performance allow. Abstracts from presentations at the ISSCC, show the Cell processor running at 4.6 Ghz.

In December 2004, Nvidia announced that they have made a multi-year agreement with SCEI to develop the PlayStation 3's GPU, which is a custom variant of their next-generation graphics processor. In fact, they had worked for two years on the chip before making the announcement. They were previously responsible for the GPU in the Xbox console.

The 'Cell' chip which will consist of 234 million transistors, and have a die size of 221mm sqaured. A single Cell is theoretically capable of achieving a maximum of 256 billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS). This astounding single precision (32bit) floating point performance has been achieved by using a new radical architecture.

The Cell chip uses a highly parallel architecture with a total of 9 cores. These cores consist of a custom general purpose PowerPC processor core which is connected to 8 "synergistic processing elements" or SPE’s for short though a central bus called the element interface bus [EIS].

The PPC core is the brains and the SPE’s are the main workers in this design. Unlike some other parallel processors the Cell can be clocked very high, in fact with voltages ranging from 0.9 to 1.3 volts it can reach clock speeds of 3.2 to 5.2GHz. At 4GHz each SPE can achieve a theoretical maximum of 32GFLOPS.

Source: Playstation 3 Portal

The following is a Powerpoint presentation of the 'cell' technology. You need Powerpoint, or a powerpoint emulated program to play it. Click below to view, or right click and "Save Target As" to download".

Source: PS3Land.com