Kishan Jainandunsing
(February 2006)

At the recent  VITA Bus & Board Conference in Long Beach, CA, January 16, 2006, IBM positioned its Cell Broadband processor for embedded applications in vertical markets.

With clock frequencies of up to 3.2GHz currently and up to 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) combined with a POWER Processing Element (PPE), the Cell Broadband processor is able to deliver impressive performance at nearly 250 times the performance of a 1GHz PowerPC 750GX processor for 16-bit integer arithmetic.

The Cell Broadband processor follows a different architecture philosophy when compared to multi-core architectures from AMD and Intel. Where the latter integrate SMP-centric architectures on silicon, mostly optimal for general purpose and on-line transaction computing, the Cell Broadband processor takes a more DSP-centric perspective to computing. The SPEs are SIMD data path accelerators around the embedded PPC processor, rather than general purpose CPUs. The SPEs can be utilized in a pipelined or parallel fashion. This makes the processor extremely efficient in all sorts of imaging, graphical, simulation, language processing, data compression, transrating, transcoding and other compute intensive applications.

One of the challenges for the embedded community when adopting the Cell Broadband processor will be the availability of companion chips. This challenge is at the same time an opportunity for much needed differentiation. So far only Toshiba has demonstrated such a chip, which it calls a Super Companion Chip or SCC. Companies which are able to engineer or partner on companion chips can gain a huge advantage tapping into the enormous performance gains that the Cell Broadband processor brings.

IBM and Mercury Computer Systems have entered into a strategic partnership that applies the Cell Broadband processor in embedded applications, such as medical imaging and defense. In the mean time Cell Industries, a startup company in Southern California, will start to offer a Linux-based integrated software development environment and development platforms based on the Cell Broadband processor and the Toshiba SCC device. These are the first steps towards broader application of the processor in vertical embedded applications and, perhaps some day COM Express modules will make their debut with Cell Broadband processors on board.