Cellular architecture
A Cellular architecture is a type of computer architecture prominent in Parallel computing. Cellular architectures are relatively new, with IBM's Cell being the first one to reach the market. Cellular architecture takes multi-core architecture design to its logical conclusion, by giving the programmer the abilty to run large numbers of concurrent threads. Each 'cell' is a compute node containing thread units, memory, and communication. Speed-up is achieved by exploiting thread level parallelism inherent in many applications.
Cell, a cellular architecture containing 9 cores, will be the processor used in the Playstation 3. Another prominent cellular architecture is Cyclops64, a massively parallel architecture currently under development by IBM.
Cellular architectures are typically very difficult to develop software for. Cellular architectures follow the concrete programming paradigm, which exposes the programmer to much of the underlying hardware. This allows the programmer to impliment powerful (platform-specific) optimizations, but at the same time makes them particularly difficult to develop for.