The Cell Processor

Mainstream processor development is mostly targeted at compatibility and continuity. Thus, the processor market is dominated by x86 compatible CPUs since more than two decades now. Several new concepts tried to gain some market share, but it was not possible to overtake the old compatibility driven concepts. A group of three corporates tries another way to come into the market with a new idea, the cell design. The cell processor is a new try to leverage the increasing amount of transistors per die in an efficient way. The new processor is targeted at the game console and consumer electronics market to enhance the quality of these devices. This will lead to a wide spreading, and if everybody has two or more cell processors in TV, game console or PDA, the interesting question comes up: what can I do with these processors? This paper gives a short overview of the architecture and several programming ideas which help to exploit the whole processing power of the cell processor