The Cell Broadband Engine Architecture. The Cell processor. The Cell. This thing is the guts of the PlayStation 3. The processor. And it’s a beaut.

Spectrum Online has an article about this thing, and it looks like a mighty powerful beast:

So far, microprocessor watchers have been impressed with what they’ve seen of Cell. “To bring huge parallel processing onto a single chip in a clean and efficient way is a real accomplishment,” says Ruby B. Lee, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University and an IEEE Fellow.

A graphics-heavy item such as PlayStation 3 isn’t just a showcase for an unusual chip. For IBM it’s a philosophical statement. “Gaming is the next interface driving computing,” says James A. Kahle, Cell’s chief architect with the IBM Technology Group, in Austin, Texas … Just as moving from punch cards to electronic displays changed what people expected of computers, the highly collaborative, real-time realism of today’s games will set the standard for what people want from computers in the future.

IEEE Spectrum: Winner: Multimedia Monster