There's a new product called the Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) coming out from the stables of Mercury Computer Systems and it goes on a high price of $7,000.
This is a PCIe plug-in adaptor (pci express) that fits in current standard motherboards and cases, as it is also part of the multi-billion project named Cell BE renowned because of Sony's upcoming and already well-known gaming system - the Playstation 3, informs Daily Tech.
The hardware component has been already tested on Linux and the Mercury MultiCore Plus Advantage software libraries. However, Mercury representatives recently claimed that the company's latest CAB provides approximately 180 GFLOPS, even if they also asserted that the CAB has been developed especially for video and render processing.
The Cell used in the Mercury is based on the small 90nm design process, but the Cell group (IBM, Toshiba and Sony) have already announced the Cell processor is moving to the 65nm process by next year. The idea of plug-in accelerators has certainly picked up steam in the last three months with AMD's backing for this project. Clearspeed also introduced a co-processor earlier this year for PCI-X acceleration, but Mercury's CAB is the first to use PCIe and the first to use Cell.
Mercury's Cell PCIe Plug-in Accelerator source
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