The raw power of the Cell CPU, developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for PS3, will apparently debut for other platforms, with the PC being by far the favorite.

During this year’s SIGGRAPH conference, which will take place next week, between August 7 and August 9, at San Diego Convention Center in California, Sony will showcase its newly developed "Cell Computing Board (prototype)".

The Cell concept was originally thought up by Sony Computer Entertainment inc. of Japan, for the PlayStation 3.  The genesis of the idea was in 1999 when Sony’s Ken Kutaragi [Kutaragi] “Father of the PlayStation” was thinking about a computer which acted like Cells in a biological system. 

IBM used a very aggressive approach when it designed Cell by producing a fully custom design - the chip’s circuitry was designed by hand instead of with automated tools, very few other companies use this approach.

Now, Sony thinks PlayStation 3 should not be the only platform on which Cell shows its capabilities, especially after the success registered with the Folding@home project (in collaboration with Stanford University). The combined computing force of the PS3 consoles that have joined the program has simply dwarfed all other participants in the project, helping the protein-folding-and-unfolding research leapfrog to levels previously thought impossible to achieve.

According to Sony’s introductory statement, “the "Cell Computing Board" incorporates the high-performance Cell Broadband EngineTM (Cell/B.E.) microprocessor and RSX graphics processor to deliver high computational performance capable of handling large amounts of data at high speed while also achieving reductions in size and energy consumption.

This technology represents a new solution for multimedia computing applications such as computer graphics and scientific computations that require massive data quantities to be processed.”

At SIGGRAPH, Sony will amaze the audience with a demonstration of “4K applications” (real time image processing of 4K images- image resolution of 4096 × 2160 pixels (H × V) - more than four times the resolution of full HD (1920 × 1080)), some CG rendering and a physics simulation (probably some particle interaction and realistic fluid dynamics, since these are the hardest to obtain even on server clusters).