Scientists interested in High Performance Computing have evaluated the CELL (Cell Broadband Engine Architecture) against existing HPC architectures and identified its potential for incredible floating point computational feats. Developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, the CELL processor designed for the Playstation 3 promises unrivaled performance characteristics at a modest price. Put simply, the CELL chip is based on an IBM PowerPC core that controls 8 SIMD cores for parallel, 128bit processing. The CELL picks up where Tranmeta's Crusoe chips left off, bridging RISC processing and commodity chip design. Each processing element is capable of handling its own memory management and is designed to operate independently, similar to parallel thread processing but separate like distributed computation.