Any Thing Under The Sun: Cell: Future of Tomorrow's Computing?

I donno how many of you have interest in Computer Architecture, but
certainly I do have some. What is this Cell about? Simple answer is that it is a code name for a radically new processing core jointly developed by Sony, IBM & Toshiba which is going to power Sony's next generation gaming console Playstation 3.

Let us see how different it is. Generally I categorize gaming systems into two categories

Off-the-shelf systems

Built from standard components similar to PC
Relatively less modifications

Highly customized systems

Where base is some standard thing (Ex: CPU) but customized heavily

Lets see some of these systems.

Off-the-shelf Systems

M$ Xbox

A Intel Celeron 733 MHz CPU
A nVidia GeForce 3MX Graphics chip
Standard DVD-ROM support
8 or 10GB ATA Hard disk
Standard PC compatible mother board and other components
You can buy a Xbox which will cost far less than a PC and run Linux on it. A cheap server on your network :-)

More any one??

Heavily customized Systems

Sony Playstation 2

A 128bit CPU Called Emotion Engine which is slightly modified MIPS III core running at 300MHz
Custom Graphics Synthesizer
I/O rocessor, which is a Playstation 1 chip!
Coustom board, standard peripheral interfaces
Standard CD-ROM & DVD-ROM support
One of the toughest gaming system for programmers due to its custom nature. Off late only
developers are able to exploit full power of PS2

Nintendo Game Cube

A modified PowerPC 750 core running at 486 MHz
A custom file format and region locking on standard DVD-ROM media!
I think it also got a custom board and few other stuff

You can see Xbox is nothing more than a standard PC where is PS2 is some thing very proprietary. All of these guys used standard processor cores x86 (CISC), MIPS (RISC), PowerPC (RISC).

This time around IBM, Sony and Toshiba are looking at future processing core called Cell, which can do more and can be used across the broad spectrum of consumer devices ranging Gaming systems, High-end Digital TVs, Portable Media player, Graphic Design Workstation etc. One of the aspects of Cell is to do broadband computing, which means that several cells could be networked to get some computation done. It could be that your portable media player may be taking help idle Game console to get some job done!

IBM has move away from traditional processor architecture with Cell which promises to deliver some thing. Some of the features of Cell are