IBM is looking to take its Cell processor further than its original target in the games industry. Sony will being using the Cell chip in its PlayStation 3 but IBM has announced that Mercury computer Systems Inc. will be developing computing boards for use in imaging-intensive markets.We designed the Cell processor to be applicable in more applications than just games," says Peter Hofstee, Cell chief scientist and architect for IBM. "Mercury is a superb example of a company that can take technology like this that is different from what is in the market now and start building up support that will enable it to move into a wider market.
The Cell itself was developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony for handling applications such as signal processing or image manipulation.Mercury is a developer of embedded computer systems for medical-imaging, defense, and seismic-processing applications, and provides both board-level products as well as supporting software. Under terms of the agreement, Mercury and engineers from IBM's engineering and technology services unit will collaborate to develop products that can be used to handle graphics-intensive workloads and other computationally intensive applications. Initial hardware testing has shown that the Cell processor can provide performance of about 200 billion floating point operations per second.
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