This coming February will mark the two-year anniversary of the public unveiling of the Cell BE processor. I was there at International Solid State Circuits Conference when it was formally introduced to thousands of excited but mildly skeptical engineers. "All this for a game console?" I heard one man next to me ask no one in particular as he looked at what would soon be the world's first nine-core commodity processor.

Yes, indeed: all this for a game console, and a server farm, and a workstation, and all the other places where IBM is using the device. But Sony is apparently tired of watching IBM make all the non-PS3 money on Cell, so they're jumping into the game with a new product called the Cell Computing Board. The Cell Computing Board is aimed at a 1U rackmount server form factor that contains the Cell BE, the Playstation 3's NVIDIA-designed RSX graphics chip, and presumably some RDRAM and I/O hardware. In other words, this new board seems to be the guts of a PS3 without the gaming- and media-related I/O hardware.

In fact, though details on the new product are quite scarce, I wouldn't be shocked at all to learn that the new board is substantially similar to the Playstation 3's mainboard. Sony is taking a bath on these consoles still, with the expensive Blu-Ray drive and other components keeping profitability at bay. Just selling the PS3's innards as a rack-mount rendering solution might be a way for Sony to actually make money on the console hardware, thereby mitigating some of the losses it takes every time a gamer walks out of Best Buy with a PS3.

But as I said above, technical details on the new board are still extremely slim, so the board could very well be a new-from-the-ground-up design that shares almost nothing with the PS3's mainboard. Right now, most of Sony's announcement of the new product is about its launch partner, Side Effect Software. Side Effect makes a set of rendering server tools called Houdini Batch and Mantra, and these will work with the new Cell board. "Server farms built around the 1U Cell Computing Unit can be fed input from Side Effects Software's workstation products Houdini Escape ($1,995) and Houdini Master ($7,995)," said Sony in the press release.

Sony and NVIDIA will be demonstrating the Cell Computing Board at SIGGRAPH this week.