(Sony) tries to sell Cell to students.

homeobocks

IEEE Guy (through email) wrote:

Excellent Opportunity for You to Practice and Take Challenge...

Dear students,

the 2007 Cell/B.E. University Challenge is now open to all university and college students.
It is a real challenge for you to shown your passion in both coding practice and learning this
cutting-edge technology--Cell Broadband Engine. With your hard work, you could win great
cash prizes.

Contest Background

The Cell Broadband Engine and Cell Broadband Engine Architecture(CBEA) are the result of
a collaboration between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, known as STI, formally started in early 2001.
The CBEA grew from a challenge to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance
processing for a wide range of applications, including the most demanding consumer appliance:
game consoles. Cell/B.E. Processor is an innovative solution whose design was based on the
analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as Cryptography, Graphics Transform and
Lighting, Physics, Fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), Matrix Operations, and Scientific Workloads.

The CBEA and the Cell/B.E. Processor implementation have been designed to enable fundamental
advances in processor performance. These advances are expected to support a broad range of
applications in both commercial and scientific fields. To name a few, Seismic Computing, Aerospace
and Defense, Medical Imaging, Digital Media & Digital Content Creation, Digital Video Surveillance,
Electronic Design and Automation, etc.

Looks like they're trying to pull a Microsoft on university students.

Monoxide

This is actually IBM doing this, and I think it's pretty cool.

They run a lot of cool coding and mainframe contests, usually the prizes are pretty lame, but if you can show off your skills in their contests they'll put you pretty high up the list for their internship opportunities.