Under the Hood of the Cell Chip

At Popular Science, they're looking at the new Cell chip. This is going to be the brains of the next PlayStation, so it gets a lot of attention. Pop Sci explains where it gets its muscle from.

Now a powerful new chip will add brains to the games’ beauty. Developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the much-ballyhooed 3.2-gigahertz Cell processor is packed with nearly 235 million transistors and nine onboard processors that can blast simultaneously through multiple calculation-intensive tasks, such as physics-simulation algorithms. Parallel processing is the latest performance- enhancing approach: Instead of upping gigahertz ratings, which are approaching their practical limits, chipmakers are combining more than one processing core on a single chip.