John Markoff reports in the New York Times on the new Cell chip architecture developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba.

The Cell has some components that in the lab switch at 5.6 GHz, and several people familiar with the design said that it was both more flexible than is generally understood and that it has been designed with high bandwidth communications, such as high-speed data links to homes, in mind. ‘Cell has been optimized for broadband-rich applications,’ said Jim Kahle, I.B.M.’s director of technology at the Design Center for Cell Technology, the headquarters in Austin, Tex., for the I.B.M., Sony and Toshiba partnership.

There is speculation, that Apple might join the alliance, since it is the biggest customer of Power PC chips, which are at the core of this new chip architecture being proposed by IBM & The Gang