Soldiers to do battle with help of Cell?

The modern soldier can go to battle with the help of Mercury Computer Systems, Inc., PowerBlock 200 (pictured left), which will provide an ability to "access and control vast arrays of deployed sensors in real time." PowerBlock(TM) 200 -- the third member of Mercury's Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor-based family of hardware products, and the first rugged device designed with the Cell BE processor.

Mercury's press release further states:

The PowerBlock 200 processing appliance is designed to deliver the raw compute power needed to propel the vision of network-centric warfare from the research laboratory into the field. At 200 GFLOPS, the processing capacity of the PowerBlock 200 rivals that of 12-20 PowerPC(R) processors or 45 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 processors -- in a COTS-deployable ATR chassis about the size of a toaster.

Mercury asks:

Imagine mobile military personnel accessing real-time, fused, high-resolution, cross-battlefield sensor data. Imagine displaying dynamic 3D, interpretive views of the battlefield in real time within every vehicle.

View Mercury's press release linked here.

Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. MultiCore Plus, PAS, PowerBlock, and TATL are trademarks of Mercury Computer Systems, Inc.

Photograph courtesy of Mercury Computers Systems, Inc.

Hat tip to Joe for the the link to Mercury's press release.