The Cell Broadband Engine, or Cell as it is more commonly known, is a microprocessor intended as a hybrid of conventional desktop processors (such as the Athlon 64, and Core 2 families) and more specialized high-performance processors, such as the NVIDIA and ATI graphics-processors (GPUs).

Cell processors are multi-core processors that use cellular architecture for high performance distributed computing. Cell processors are made of hardware and software cells whose interoperability is similar to how neural cells perform in the human brain.

Cellular architecture takes multi-core architecture design to its logical conclusion, by giving the programmer the ability to run large numbers of concurrent threads within a single processor. Each 'cell' is a compute node containing thread units, memory, and communication.

Cell is just as much of a multi-core processor as the upcoming multi-core CPUs from AMD and Intel, the only difference being that Cell's architecture doesn't have an entirely homogeneous set of cores.