THE STI Cell processor which is being jacked under the bonnet of the forthcoming PS3, has got boffins at the US Department of Energy`s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory all excited.

The Labs have been doing tests on the chip to see if it has any potential beyond shoot-em-ups and has come to the conclusion that it could be the next big thing for scientific computing.

According to the report, which can be read here, testing showed that the Cell architecture had tremendous potential for scientific computations in terms of performance and power efficiency.

The boffins liked the Cell`s heterogeneous multi-core implementation which they thought was better suited to the HPC environment than ordinary chips. The Cell is the work of Sony, Toshiba, and IBM and uses a high performance software-controlled memory hierarchy in conjunction with more of floating point resources than you can point a stick at.

The paper said that the Cell takes a radical departure by using identical cooperating commodity processors which have a high performance PowerPC core that controls eight simple SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) cores. The boffins think that because it will be produced in high volumes it will be more cost-competitive with commodity CPUs.

Boffins throughout the world are concerned at the slowing pace of commodity microprocessor clock rates and increasing chip power demands and the STI Cell fits the bill nicely.

That is not to say that it does not need some minor modifications. Most scientific applications need 64 bit chips and the Cell is better at 32-bit work. However with some modifications, the Cell managed to wipe the flaw (sic) with the AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium2 and Cray X1 chips. µ