Cell

[Brittany]

Sony IBM Toshiba​

So the way that the Cell processor works is that there is a pool of 16 or so of these (probably not completely identical) RISC or SIMD/VLIW cores on a single die. The system will do its processing by drawing resources from this pool on a task-specific basis. For instance, the audio processing subsystem will consist of a set of software routines that request cycles from the pool for the purpose of processing 3D audio. The 3D engine will similarly request cycles from the same pool for rendering, and similarly with the game AI system, etc. The different processing cores will probably be grouped together dynamically by software into "teams" in order to complete specific tasks (i.e. 3D rendering, audio, etc.). Each team's size will scale dynamically to fit its current workload by either acquiring new cores from the pool or releasing unneeded cores back to the pool for use by other processes.

Cool huh? The processor is made of processors that are made to target different tasks. If there is a task that is too hard for one processor to do, the other ones jump in to help it. And each of them can produce virtual processors(kinda like the Pentium 4 HT) within themselves to make even more processors working on a task specific basis.

Making this is an over $400 million project for Sony.
Gamecube2 is using another PowerPC processor, so they invest nothing in designing their processor.