The CELL Microprocessor at a Glance

CELL...bringing supercomputer power to everyday life with latest technology optimized for compute-intensive and broadband rich media applications

SUMMARY:

• Cell is a breakthrough architectural design -- featuring 8 Synergistic Processing Units (SPU) with Power-based core, with top clock speeds exceeding 4 GHz (as measured during initial laboratory testing).

• Cell is OS neutral - supporting multiple operating systems simultaneously

• Cell is a multicore chip comprising 8 SPUs and a 64-bit Power processor core capable of massive floating point processing

• Special circuit techniques, rules for modularity and reuse, customized clocking structures, and unique power and thermalmanagement concepts were applied to optimize the design

CELL is a Multi-Core Architecture

• Contains 8 SPUs each containing a 128 entry 128-bit register file and 256KB Local Store

• Contains 64-bit Power ArchitectureTM with VMX that is a dual thread SMT design-views system memory as a 10-way coherent threaded machine

• 2.5MB of on Chip memory (512KB L2 and 8 * 256KB)

• 234 million transistors

• Prototype die size of 221mm2

• Fabricated with 90nanometer (nm) SOI process technology

• Cell is a modular architecture and floating point calculation capabilities can be adjusted by increasing or reducing the number of SPUs

CELL is a Broadband Architecture

• Compatible with 64b Power ArchitectureTM

• SPU is a RISC architecture with SIMD organization and Local Store

• 128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor

• High speed internal element interconnect bus performing at 96B/cycle

CELL is a Real-Time Architecture

• Resource allocation (for Bandwidth Management)

• Locking caches (via Replacement Management Tables)

• Virtualization support with real time response characteristics across multiple operating systems running simultaneously

CELL is Security Enabled Architecture

• SPUs dynamically configurable as secure processors for flexible security programming

CELL is a Confluence of New Technologies

• Virtualization techniques to support conventional and real time applications

• Autonomic power management features

• Resource management for real time human interaction

• Smart memory flow controllers (DMA) to sustain bandwidth