AnandTech continues its tradition of exceptionally thorough articles with thirteen pages of coverage on the much-hyped Cell chip. Anand cuts through the hype to focus on what architectural decisions give the Cell its unique processing capabilities -- and limitations. Highly recommended.

Basically, the Cell chip consists of a standard PowerPC core, nine very simple cores with 256KB each of local SRAM, a super-fast 25.6 GB/s memory controller by Rambus, and an unbelievable 76.8 GB/s IO bus. It's an innovative approach that should make the Playstation 3, Cell's primary reason to exist, a console to watch over the next year. The big question yet to be answered is whether games will be written to take full advantage of the parallel processing capability of those nine extra cores.

Even though it's highly doubtful it will have much immediate effect on the PC industry, the Cell chip is likely a glimpse into the multi-core and special purpose core future of microprocessors.