Meep meep. The PlayStation 3's powerful hardware does it again, contributing its powerful Cell Broadband Engine to create the world's fastest supercomputer, er... again. Named the Roadrunner, this new supercomputer runs at speeds exceeding one petaflop - that is, one thousand trillion calculations per second. Let's see Wile E. Coyote try to catch up with that. Watch a mini-documentary of the supercomputer in the full article.

If even the current generation of processors are not fast enough for you, you might be interested to know the next batch could ship bundled with seat-belts.

Leading the pack is the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The first-generation Cell in Sony's PS3 has been clocked at 4GHz. This second-generation chip will zip by at 6GHz. Built for speed, yes, but it will also have a dual power supply for higher memory performance.

Behind the second-gen Cell is IBM's Power6 processor. This speed demon packs 700 million transistors inside a 341 square millimeters and can exceed 5 GHz when running in high-performance mode. Designed for servers, the Power6 consumes less than 100 watts in power-sensitive applications. That puts it in the same neighborhood as the 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips.

Intel's electronic racehorse is a prototype chip with 80 cores that can perform 1.28 trillion calculations per second. The chip measures 275 square millimeters and will run at 4GHz. It has 100 million transistors and dissipates 98 watts of waste heat.

Sun Microsystems has the Niagara 2 processor. The chip measures 342 square millimeters with 500 million transistors. Its eight-core design can run 64 simultaneous sequences of instructions.

IBM wins the bid to build "Roadrunner", a supercomputer system that will compete (and hopes to outdo) Japan's "Protein Explorer" and its own Blue Gene/L. IBM-Los Alamos will announce the plans as to when the project will officially start, but it's going to be a phase by phase process that begins this September and ends in 2007.

It seems a little off-topic, PS3 fans should start rejoicing. The Roadrunner kicks off a new trend in supercomputing, which relies on "hybrids" to sustain the performance level of a "petaflop," or 1 quadrillion calculations per second. These hybrids are a combination of general-purpose processors and special-purpose accelerator chips. In this case, it's going to be not just Opteron chips, but the Cell processor from Sony's PS3 as well. The Cell processor as we know it was originally designed to improve video game performance in the PlayStation 3 console.

Obviously, this is going to lead us to a futuristic conclusion: With more powerful petaflop-churning supercomputers, there will be greater possibility for more high-speed gaming systems and machines to come out in the future. Also, because the U.S. government has become an avid supercomputer customer, the nuclear simulations will be continuously fueled.

Gaming, as we know it, will never be the same again.