The IBM, Sony and Toshiba treo have teamed to design a new multicore 64-bit power processor chip dubbed, the cell. It sounds a little sci-fi to me, let’s hope they don’t bring in J-Lo for this one, or I will start to get worried. The Cell processor will use multiple synergistic processor cores capable of massive floating point processing.

Important Cell processor design features:

– Multi-thread, multicore architecture.
– Supports multiple operating systems.
– Substantial bus bandwidth to/from main memory, as well as companion chips.
– Flexible on-chip I/O (input/output) interface.
– Real-time resource management system for real-time applications.
– On-chip hardware in support of security system for intellectual property protection.
– Implemented in 90 nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology.

(Sorry for the cheese photo)