One of the highest-performing CPUs ever to be made available to the general public, was slated to make its premiere in, of all things, a game console - one whose retail price actually likely to lose money for its manufacturer with each sale. The first details were sketchy, and those to follow were sketchier. But a picture emerged of a processor with as many as two PowerPC processor cores, supplemented by one or more supplemental processors with extraordinary floating-point capabilities. The internal bus between these cores is remarkable in itself. Back in February, system builders and computer enthusiasts alike began asking themselves, what will the first Cell-powered Macintosh systems be like? The answer to that question came a little too soon.

Story Link: The first details of IBM's multi-core Cell processor emerge