A recent story in EE Times generated a lot of interest on discussion boards regarding the open sourcing of IBM’s new Cell processor, but it seems that the excitement may be a bit premature. The article (IBM will unlock door to Cell) appears at first read to detail how IBM is throwing open the Cell architecture itself into the open-source community, a la the hardware specifications being developed at OpenCores.org. But what the community is actually getting are the specifications for the CPU and the system libraries necessary to make it do interesting things.

This is certainly less than open sourcing the core itself, but still no small announcement. These are the power tools necessary for writing deep OS code, the kind of code that will be necessary if the Cell is to reach wide acceptance. The question is whether systems programmers will take the architecture to heart and make it do interesting things. It shows real promise for applications that can take advantage of heavy multithreading, but this is a very different architecture. The question is whether programmers and systems designers will take it to heart.