Cell to run at 4GHz!

[MuGen]

It wasn't quite the detail many attendees of ISSCC had hoped for, but IBM, Sony and Toshiba revealed enough information about their much-hyped Cell processor to spur discussion and speculation of the impact of the chip when it hits the market.

The prototype shown at the conference is based on Power architecture, integrates nine cores and runs at "more than 4 GHz".

The basic structure of the chip is comprised out of one 64-bit PowerPC chip and eight "synergistic processing units" (SPEs), the firms said. The PowerPC processor will integrate 32 kByte L1 and 512 kByte L2 cache, while the SPEs will use 256 KByte cache.

The "operating system neutral" chip is manufactured in 90 nm SOI, has a 221 mm2 footprint and integrates 234 million transistors. This compares to about 125 million transistors of the current Pentium 4 processor, which measures 122 mm2....

Full Article:
Cell chip clocks in at 4GHz

This chip has 8 SPE's or APU's... and the way the on-processor is structured, it will allow for pipelining between the units. This is the real power of the Cell and not it's 4GHz clock speed.... I can't wait to see this thing in action.