A CPU chip developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba that is designed for media processing such as in high-definition TV sets. Using an enhanced PowerPC CPU and eight floating point units, the Cell is expected to achieve an effective clock speed close to 5 GHz.
The Cell's Extended Data RAM (XDR) memory interface and FlexIO bus provide exceptional I/O bandwidth in and out of the CPU. Sony's PlayStation 3 and a workstation from IBM were the first Cell-based machines. Cell chips were later used in the first supercomputer to reach one petaFLOPS (see Roadrunner).
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