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The Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell) is a microprocessor jointly developed by SONY, Toshiba, and IBM. It is a multi-core chip containing the 64-bit Power processor core and multiple, independent SIMD processor cores. This architecture makes real time multimedia processing possible, which enables this chip to be used not only in next generation electronics and computer entertainment systems, but also in many other fields such as defence, communications, science and medical systems. Currently the PLAYSTATION®3, IBM & Mercury Blade Servers, Mercury and Fixstar PCIe boards use the Cell BE. An inherent problem with the Cell is it's complexity. With it's 9 cores, DMA engines and 128 bit vector registers, there is quite a learning curve to climb before a programmer is able to leverage the power of the Cell. This is where the Cell BE Execution Framework (CEF) comes in.
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