IBM QS22 blade announced
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24180.wss
ARMONK, NY - 13 May 2008: Driven by growing commercial need in areas such as financial services, digital media creation and medical imaging, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today expanded its High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities for businesses with the introduction of the IBM® BladeCenter® QS22 — a new, economical supercomputing technology inspired by advanced scientific research facilities.
The heart of the QS22 is a new processor compliant with the Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) Architecture, originally developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to provide the computing power for cutting-edge gaming applications. And for the most challenging arithmetic operations, this new processor, the IBM PowerXCell™ 8i, offers five-times the speed of the original Cell/B.E. processor.
This does sound cool. I remain a big fan of the Cell/B.E platform, any innovation of the platform has to be a good thing for the consumer in terms of choice and the blade platform. The extra memory support sounds very cool and should provide further opportunities/uses for those memory intensive HPC applications.


