The stability of a class of delayed cellular neural networks (DCNN) with or without noise perturbation is studied. After presenting a simple and easily checkable condition for the global exponential stability of a deterministic system, we further investigate the case with noise perturbation. When DCNN is perturbed by external noise, the system is globally stable. An important fact is that, when the system is perturbed by internal noise, it is globally exponentially stable only if the total noise strength is within a certain bound. This is significant since the stochastic resonance phenomena have been found to exist in many nonlinear systems.