Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been looking at the possibility of using the STI Cell processor for scientific computing. The new Cell processor was developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony for the upcoming PlayStation 3 game consol. The results from LBNL, comparing the Cell processor with other state-of-the-art processors like the Intel Itanium IA64 and the AMD Opteron, show that the Cell processor could be 10 times faster on scientific computing tasks. The benchmarks include typical CFD like computations.

Who knows, by Christmas we might be bringing our CFD simulations with us home to run them on our PS3 game consols :-)

A presentation about the Cell from LBNL can be found here and a whole report about the investigation can be downloaded here.