IBM to build Cell Broadband Engine processors

High speed chip interface firm Rambus has signed a technology licensing agreement with IBM, allowing IBM to build Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processors and companion chips using Rambus' FlexIO processor bus and XDR memory interface technologies.

Rambus' high-speed FlexIO and XDR interfaces in combination with IBM's advanced process technology will enable Cell BE system customers to maximise the performance of high-volume consumer products, servers and high-performance computing systems, the companies said.

The Cell BE processor, jointly developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony Group, is an architectural design featuring eight synergistic processing elements plus a Power Architecture-based core designed for high performance levels in many computationally intense applications.

The Cell BE processor has peak performance in excess of 200 billion floating-point operations per second.

The Rambus XDR memory interface and FlexIO processor bus account for 90 per cent of the Cell BE processor signal pins, providing an aggregate processor I/O bandwidth of approximately 100 gigabytes-per-second.

The Rambus XDR memory interface connecting to XDR DRAMs achieves data rates of 3.2GHz to 8.0GHz, the companies said. FlexIO processor buses, formerly codenamed Redwood, are capable of running up to 8.0GHz data rates.