The Cell Broadband Enginee (Cell/B.E.) processor is the first implementation of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. In addition to use of the Cell/B.E. processor in the Sony Computer Entertainment PLAYSTATIONt3 system, there is much interest in using it for workstations, media-rich electronics devices, and video and image processing systems. The Cell/B.E. processor includes one PowerPCt processor element (PPE) and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs). The CBEA is designed to be well suited for a wide variety of programming models, and it allows for partitioning of work between the PPE and the eight SPEs. In this paper we show that the Cell/B.E. processor can outperform other modern processors by approximately an order of magnitude and by even more in some cases.

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