Architecture overview

The Cell Broadband Engine consists of nine processors on a single chip, all connected to each other and to external devices by a high-bandwidth, memory-coherent bus.

Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the Cell Broadband Engine. The main blocks include the:
Figure 1. Overview of Cell Broadband Engine architectureOverview of the CBE architecture
The memory-coherent EIB has two external interfaces, as shown in Figure 1:

The Cell Broadband Engine supports concurrent real-time and non-real-time operating systems and resource management. Software development in the C/C++ language is supported by a rich set of language extensions that define C/C++ data types for SIMD operations and map C/C++ intrinsics (commands, in the form of function calls) to one or more assembly instructions.

These language extensions give C/C++ programmers much greater control over code performance, without the need for assembly-language programming. Software development is further supported by: