Cell processor finally tips up
THE CELL MICROPROCESSOR, developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony, has started sampling under the rather bizarre brand name of SpursEngine 1000 (SE1000).
Toshiba reckons that there's a potential market for six million of the things over the next three years.
The original cell ended up in Sony's PS3 and has seven operational cores together with a PowerPC in the middle. IBM and Toshiba started joint work on the chip with Sony back in 2001.
“The design of this powerful co-processor is dedicated to bringing the advanced capabilities of the Cell to consumer electronics, particularly video processing in digital consumer products. We are sure that SpursEngine will accelerate the market for full-HD applications,” said Yoshio Masubuchi, Director of Toshiba’s System LSI Division, Advanced SoC Development Centre.
The SE1000 co-processor has a hardware codec for HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams and four slave cores optimised for media streaming. The chip, built on a 65nm process, is sampling at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz with power consumption between 10W and 20W. The company says it's working to shrink the die and reduce power consumption.
The reference board has a PCI-Express edge connector that can connect to an x1 layer slot in a PC. Toshiba is also working with Corel, CyberLink and Leadtek Research on applications development including HDTV set top boxes. µ
L'Inq
Toshiba
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The Cell CPU has a single PPU and 8 SPUs. The PS3 Cell disables an SPU so that the yields are higher in production. This SpursEngine has 4 SPUs and some custom logic around it. 

It's a good reuse of a hardware component, and I guess that people with SPU experience will not be rare as an honest politician because of the PS3, so it can be developed for.
When I want to laught I come in to check the news.

http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/01/07/playstation3-architecture-revealed
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/02/07/sony-and-ibm-cell-technology-emerges
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2005/08/29/ibm-sony-cell-processing-details-disclosed
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2004/11/29/ibm-sony-firm-up-playstation-cell-chip-plans

You guys might want to start something else than being just pseudo-jounalist...

lololol
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at 20W that sounds like an awesome processor.

I thought the cell was going to be a flop, ultimately.

10 - 20 W is a far cry from the 300+ W that a PS3 uses, and this new cell iteration has 4 cores?

I'm interested.

Perhaps it will be Toshiba that takes the charge against Intel. Obviously AMD ain't gonna do it.
The Cell Processor has been available in the IBM Bladecenter QS20 and QS21 since 29 September, 2006. So, old news.
Leaving aside the '...finally tips up...'.

This is something that IBM/Sony/Toshiba said they wanted to happen even back int 2002. They expected to see the Cell arch used for embedded devices. So, good for them. Why they waited until Intel was taking a run at the embedded market I do not understand.

Also, a 10-20w 4 SPE Cell at 1.5 GHz would make a very nice and quiet if unusual PC running (you guessed it) linux. I'd buy one.