View of the Cell Broadband Engine

Introduction The cell microprocessor, also known as the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE), is a Power Architecture­based microprocessor developed for high­workload and multimedia­based computing. The cell processor was designed by STI, a partnership among Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, although IBM remains the key developer of the project. Built with massive floating point operations in mind, the original processor was developed with a Power Architecture core surrounded by eight " synergistic " processors. Although the cell processor has strong computing potential, it is widely regarded as a challenging programming environment [1]; as a result, interest in the processor has waned. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of the Cell microprocessor: we start with a brief history, discuss its three principal components, introduce its instruction set architecture, and finish with a summary of its programming challenges. The IBM Cell architecture is the product of a joint engineering effort by three companies, Sony, Toshiba and IBM. In 2001 the three companies established the STI (Sony Toshiba IBM) Design Center in Austin, Texas to develop a new " supercomputer on a chip. " The work involved over 400 engineers and took approximately 4 years to complete [2]. This project came about at the request of then Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. CEO Ken Kutaragi. Kutaragi was coming off the immensely successful release of the PlayStation 2, and was looking for new technologies to give the company a leg up over Microsoft in the next generation game console cycle. Unsatisfied with the microprocessors available at the time, Kutaragi challenged IBM to develop a new, faster design in time for the 2005 announcement of the PlayStation 3. Although initially targeted at the PlayStation 3, the engineers at the STI Design Center wanted to create an architecture that would be more general purpose. Initial reports suggest that they were chasing the embedded market as well, with Cell proposed for things like televisions and home theater systems — applications that require high data throughputs. These ambitious goals were reflected in the product name they chose, the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), emphasizing that it was a high bandwidth processor. Ken Kutaragi, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., visualized the processor as a completely new way of handling multi­core designs: he related the system to that of a biological unit, a network of " cells " forming the building blocks of a larger system. He felt that …