The first thing that comes to your mind when you talk about CELL Broadband Engine is probably the Sony Playstation 3. Toshiba, a prominent player in ultra-portable computing have announced that a new pair of laptops, the Qosmio G55 and Qosmio F40, which will feature processors derived from the CELL design methodology. Processing will be composed of a two-stage processor, the modified CELL processor SPE cores will handle the heavy calculations required to handle processor-intensive duties like processing HD video. The main processor in the pair of notebooks will be an Intel Core 2 Duo. The World's most powerful supercomputer, the IBM Roadrunner, incorporates CELL technology. The CELL variation used consists of four SSP's apart from the arbiter, Toshiba brands this chip as Toshiba Quad-Core HD processor.

The G55 which has an 18.4-inch high-definition screen, 500GB of hard-disk space, NVidia GeForce 9600M graphics processor, dual digital TV tuners and wireless LAN including 802.11n will be priced from USD 2,700 and the F40, which has a 15-inch screen and 250GB hard-disk drive, from USD 2,320. Toshiba plans to put the machines on sale overseas but has yet to announce launch details.

A government computer in New Mexico is the first supercomputer to perform at one petaflop (one thousand trillion calculations per second). Located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, Roadrunner is twice as fast as IBM Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which was until now the fastest computer in the world. The new supercomputer is designed and built by IBM using both traditional computer chips and IBM's Cell Broadband Engine. Roadrunner occupies 6,000 square feet and weighs 500,000 lbs. It is also aiming to take place among the top energy-efficient systems on the official "Green 500" list of supercomputers. Roadrunner will be used primarily to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. It will also do research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate change. Learn more here.