IBM/Toshiba/Sony Cell CPU

Given the few comments on the web about supply being locked up until and likely after the introduction of the PS3, I'd guess probably not unless you have substantial influence.

But just on the outside chance, is it possible to buy a plausibly priced development kit board with 1 or 2 or, go wild, 16 of these on it with a bootloader and some empty SDRAM sockets to keep them busy?

Or any info on how to hack a PS3 to load and run a little bare code on them when they are finally released?

Obviously some researchers at Lawrence Lab got their hands on it..

Empty sdram?? Anyway the closest thing I got to was spare parts to blade servers which doesn't seem to have surfaced their product range yet. Ofcourse if the MIPS/money factor isn't right it's dead on arrival anyway.

Nope.. But put it this way, to run u need cpu, ram, rom, i/o. Given sonys history they will most likely stuff PS3 with propietary lockdown. Anything not in that needed-to-run can be removed/overwritten.