The news on the breathless wait for the new Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 hasn’t been all that interesting for those of us that don’t partake much of game machines, but we can finally get some solid information on the new multicore Cell processor as promised from IBM. The release consists of a ton of information on the operation of the processor, as well as an instruction-level simulator and a compiler.

I have just started to dig into this, but it shows a lot of promise. There are some C++ extensions, although parallelization of code is going to be a manual process in this release of the tools. I’ve found myself wondering if the tools will be applicable to the multicore PowerPC architecture of the upcoming Xbox 360 as well, although I suspect they will not. They may create single-threaded code for that CPU, but the unique architecture of the Cell is more than likely the only target that can really take advantage of these extensions.

The degree of customization that can be supported with variants of the Cell could make this a very interesting architecture for relatively high-volume applications. The question is whether the pricing will be attractive for lower-price applications like consumer devices. Given that the first application is a home game machine, it might be possible, but that could be an anomaly.

Larry Mittag