Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". Each SPE is composed of a "Synergistic Processing Unit", SPU, and a "Memory Flow Controller", MFC (DMA, MMU, and bus interface).The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by Sony as approaching US$400 million. Cell is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part. Cell combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.