In the Streaming Model, each SPE, in either a serial or parallel pipeline, computes data that streams through.
The PPE acts as a stream controller, and the SPEs act as stream-data processors. For the SPEs, on-chip load and store bandwidth exceeds off-chip DMA-transfer bandwidth by an order of magnitude. If each SPE has an equivalent amount of work, this model can be an efficient way to use the Cell Broadband Engine because data remains inside the Cell Broadband Engine as long as possible.
The PPE and SPEs support message-passing between the PPE, the processing SPE, and other SPEs.
Although the SDK does not include a formal streaming language, most of the programs written for the Cell Broadband Engine are likely to use the streaming model to some extent. For example, the Euler particle-system simulation (described in Example 1: Euler particle-system simulation) implements the streaming model. This particle-system simulation contains a computational kernel that streams packets of data through the kernel for each step in time.