ABSTRACT
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Disclaimers and Declarations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 Trademarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Cell Broadband EngineTM,∗ often also just called “the Cell processor,” “Cell/B.E.” or shortly “Cell,” is a heterogeneous multicore processor architecture that was introduced in 2005 by STI, a cooperation of Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM. With its special architectural design, Cell can speed up gaming, graphics, and scientic computations by up to two orders of magnitude over contemporary standard general-purpose processors, and this at a comparable power consumption. For instance, in a comparative simulation experiment [58], a Cell processor clocked at 3.2 GHz achieved for a single-precision dense matrix-matrix multiplication (SGEMM) a performance of 204.7 Gops† at approximately 40 W, while (at that time) an AMD OpteronTM processor only reached 7.8 Gops and an Intel Itanium2TM only 3.0 Gops on this benchmark.
