Sony and IBM have confirmed that the cell processor will be the basis for Sony's PlayStation 3 and will go into limited production next year. Mass production of the chip will begin sometime in 2006.

IBM plans to show off the chip as a chip conference in February 2005. The chip, which will have a PowerPC base and a 64-bit core will also be part of dedicated high definition TVs made by Toshiba. The Cell processor is reported to have eight vectorial processors, each with its own allocation of memory.

So what does this all mean? Basically the standard clock speed of "megahertz" doesn't matter anymore. The chip technically is clocked over the 4GHz speed. According to people close to the firms plans have stated as saying the four Cell PlayStation 3 could produce as much as one teraflop.

How it all works have been explained to the INQUIRER:

"He said that the computers are made of cells, each one containing a CPU, which will probably be a PowerPC, and eight APUs (vectorial processors) each with 128K of memory.

It will run at 4GHz, producing a not inconsiderable 256Gflops, with the cells connected to the central 64MB memory through a switched 1024 bit bus.

It's still not clear how many of these "cells" will be used in the Playstation3, but Sony reckoned some time ago it could be as many as one teraflop, probably making it a four cell architecture.

Optical links – perhaps even FireWire optical links – could be used to share computing power.

The Playstation3 architecture is similar to the Playstation 2 but with some improvements, such as a larger number of VPUs, each with more memory. The operating system, too, is much improved.

But Playstations will still be very complex to program well, although it's just as well that Sony doesn't want to take the Microsoft DirectX route."

The first series of Cell processors will appear in HDTVs and the Sony Playstation 3 next generation video games console...