At the International Solid State Circuits Conference yesterday, IBM, Sony, and Toshiba took the wraps off their long-awaited Cell processor. Back in 2001, the three companies decided to form an alliance to create the processor that would power the upcoming Sony PlayStation 3. Last year, they let it be known that the Cell would have other uses, such as powering new workstations.
Our CPU Editor Jon "Hannibal" Stokes was on hand for both presentations today. Here is part II of his two-part series on the architecture of the Cell processor. Part II covers the basic architecture of the processor along with some thoughts on whether the Cell is a good thing for Apple.
In today's session, IBM introduced the overall architecture of the Cell processor. Unfortunately, they didn't include many more microarchitectural details in today's session than they did in yesterday's. Most of the session covered issues like power management, clocking, the design process, and so on. So today's article is going to be more along the lines of a follow-up to yesterday's piece.
Dig in to Hannibal's coverage!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/BAaf?m=134