Mercury Computer Systems has just introduced a new product - the Cell Accelerator Board (CAB), a PCIe plug-in adaptor that fits in currently available standard motherboards and cases, as it is also part of the multi-billion project named Cell BE renowned because of Sony's upcoming and already well-known gaming system - the Playstation 3, informs Daily Tech.

Mercury was also the first manufacturer to develop and make available the Cell rack mount servers, which were launched in the first months of this year.

The hardware component has been already adopted by the use of Linux and the Mercury MultiCore Plus Advantage software libraries. However, Mercury representatives recently stated that the company's latest CAB provides approximately 180 GFLOPS, even if they also asserted that the CAB has been developed especially for video and render processing.

"We have been actively working with customers to migrate data-intensive applications to the Cell BE processor since late last year," said Randy Dean, Vice President, Business and Technology Development at Mercury. "With the CAB, customers can achieve supercomputer-like performance right inside their workstation."

Mercury used a special Cell produced using a 90nm (nanometer) design process, though, the Cell Alliance members, including IBM, Toshiba and Sony, have announced that they intend to introduce into the manufacturing process the 65 nm process by next year's end.

Mercury's CAB will be soon available at a rather high price of $7,000.