One article says:
The ‘cell’ which gives the chip its name doesn’t refer to the hardware, but to a virtual clump of software which roams the system looking for computing resources. The patent refers to a “cell object” - program and data - and it can even roam across LANs or WANs, to find another Cell-based device.Which sounds a little too ambitious / really really hard to make work well.
A Cell chip consists of one or more independent execution units, and a program can commandeer as many of these as resources allow to create a temporary execution pipeline, each with its own register file and banks of RAM. These pipelines are dynamically configurable and can lock out other processes from grabbing their hardware resources.
Hopefully our resident architecture expert jeffr will find the time to give us a report. Check back later to see if he comments! :)