Cell (microprocessor) - History

History

In mid-2000, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba Corporation, and IBM formed an alliance known as "STI" to design and manufacture the processor.

The STI Design Center opened in March 2001. The Cell was designed over a period of four years, using enhanced versions of the design tools for the POWER4 processor. Over 400 engineers from the three companies worked together in Austin, with critical support from eleven of IBM's design centers.

During this period, IBM filed many patents pertaining to the Cell architecture, manufacturing process, and software environment. An early patent version of the Broadband Engine was shown to be a chip package comprising four "Processing Elements", which was the patent's description for what is now known as the Power Processing Element (PPE). Each Processing Element contained 8 APUs, which are now referred to as SPEs on the current Broadband Engine chip. This chip package was widely regarded to run at a clock speed of 4 GHz and with 32 APUs providing 32 gigaFLOPS each, the Broadband Engine was shown to have 1 teraFLOPS of raw computing power. This design was fabricated using a 90 nm SOI process.

In March 2007 IBM announced that the 65 nm version of Cell BE is in production at its plant in East Fishkill, New York.

In February 2008, IBM announced that it will begin to fabricate Cell processors with the 45 nm process.

In May 2008, IBM introduced the high-performance double-precision floating-point version of the Cell processor, the PowerXCell 8i, at the 65 nm feature size.

In May 2008, an Opteron- and PowerXCell 8i-based supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner system, became the world's first system to achieve one petaFLOPS, and was the fastest computer in the world until third quarter 2009. The world's three most energy efficient supercomputers, as represented by the Green500 list, are similarly based on the PowerXCell 8i.

The 45 nm Cell processor was introduced in concert with Sony's PlayStation 3 Slim in August 2009.

In November 2009, an IBM representative said that it has discontinued the development of a Cell processor with 32 APUs but they have not halted development of other future products in the Cell family.