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TC electronic PowerCore X8
- Cost ~ 1499 €
- 8 DSP @ 150 Mhz (?!)
- Firewire (400 Mbit/s)

Sony PS3
- Cost ~ 399 €
- 8 SPE (DSP like) inside the Cell @ 3.2 Ghz (~200 Gigaflops !)
- Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbit/s)

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Short Overview 

The Cell architecture consists of a number of elements:

The Cell Processor
This is a 9 core processor, one of these cores is a PowerPC and acts as a controller.  The remaining 8 cores are called SPEs and these are very high performance vector processors.  Each SPE contains it's own block of high speed RAM and is capable of 32 GigaFlops (32 bit).  The SPEs are independent processors and can act alone or can be set up to process a stream of data with different SPEs working on different stages.  This ability to act as a "stream processor" gives access to the full processing power of a Cell which is claimed to be more than 10 times higher than even the fastest desktop processors.

In addition to the raw processing power the Cell includes a high performance multi-channel memory subsystem and a number of high speed interconnects for connecting to other Cells or I/O devices.

Distributing Processing
A software infrastructure under development will allow Cells to work together.  While they can be directly connected via the high speed interconnects they can also be connected in other ways or distributed over a network.  The Cells are not gaming or computer specific, they can be in anything from PDAs to TVs but they can still be used to act as a single system.

Parallel programming is usually complex but in this case the OS will look at the resources it has and distribute tasks accordingly, this process does not involve any more programming than the initial parallelisation.  If you want more processing power you simply add more Cells, you do not need to replace the existing ones as the new Cells will augment the existing ones.

Overall the Cell architecture is an architecture for distributed, parallel processing using very powerful computational engines developed using a highly aggressive design strategy.  These devices shall be produced in vast numbers so they will provide vast processing resources at a low cost.