Japan Semiconductor Innovation 50 (D-18 2000s)
Cell Broadband Engine - Product and Application Development (Toshiba, IBM, Sony Group)
Toshiba, IBM, Sony, and Sony Computer Entertainment jointly
developed Cell Broadband Engine (Cell B.E.), which was a high-performance
full-fledged multi-core processor, targeting at wide applications, covering
super-computers and game-machine. They started the project in March 2001,
and the first game machine which installed the Cell B.E was sold in June
2006. The Cell B.E. was remarkable for its pioneering adoption of multi-core
system architecture to prevent the increase of power consumption which was
unavoidable in high performance processors. The first product of Cell B.E.
integrated a 64-bit general purpose processor and 8 SIMD-type multimedia
processing cores on one chip.
The Cell B.E. expanded its use in digital TV sets and supercomputers.
Die Photo of the Cell/B.E. |
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| Offered by Toshiba |