Cellular architecture
Encyclopedia
Computer architecture
In computer science and engineering, computer architecture is the practical art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals and the formal modelling of those systems....
prominent in parallel computing
Parallel computing
Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...
. Cellular architectures are relatively new, with IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
's Cell microprocessor
Cell microprocessor
Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a...
being the first one to reach the market. Cellular architecture takes multi-core architecture
Multi-core (computing)
A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent actual processors , which are the units that read and execute program instructions...
design to its logical conclusion, by giving the programmer the ability to run large numbers of concurrent threads within a single processor. Each 'cell' is a compute node containing thread units, memory, and communication. Speed-up is achieved by exploiting thread-level parallelism inherent in many applications.
Cell, a cellular architecture containing 9 cores, is the processor used in the PlayStation 3
PlayStation 3
The is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...
. Another prominent cellular architecture is Cyclops64
Cyclops64
Cyclops64 is a cellular architecture in development by IBM. The Cyclops64 project aims to create the first "supercomputer on a chip".-History:...
, a massively parallel architecture currently under development by IBM.
Cellular architectures follow the low-level programming paradigm, which exposes the programmer to much of the underlying hardware. This allows the programmer to greatly optimize his code for the platform, but at the same time makes it more difficult to develop software
Software development
Software development is the development of a software product...
.