An Open Source Environment for Cell Broadband Engine System Software

The cell broadband engine provides the first implementation of a chip multiprocessor with a significant number of general-purpose programmable cores targeting a broad set of workloads. Open source software played a critical role in the development of the cell software stack. The system includes a power architecture processor and eight attached processor element. The cell team turned to open source software to accelerate the development of an ecosystem for the cell architecture. Using a quadword-based memory interface simplifies the data alignment logic and reduces operation latency.