Overview of the Cell Broadband Engine

  1. Introduction
    The first generation Cell Broadband Engine is the first incarnation of a new family of microprocessors conforming to the Cell Broadband Processor Architecture (CBEA). The CBEA is a new architecture that extends the 64-bit PowerPC Architecture.
  2. Architecture overview
    The Cell Broadband Engine consists of nine processors on a single chip, all connected to each other and to external devices by a high-bandwidth, memory-coherent bus.
  3. Programming Overview
    The instruction set for the PPE is an extended version of the PowerPC instruction set. The extensions consist of the Vector/SIMD Multimedia Extension instruction set plus a few additions and changes to PowerPC instructions.
  4. The software development kit
    A software development kit (SDK) is available for the Cell Broadband Engine.