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New 'Supercomputer on a Chip' Makes Debut
 02/07/2005 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The highly anticipated microchip that will power the Sony PlayStation 3 game system made its debut on Monday, as IBM, Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. showed off the inner workings of a chip intended to run a new generation of electronics. Dubbed a "supercomputer on a chip," the Cell microprocessor has until now been long on ambition but short on specifics. At a technical conference in San Francisco, the three electronics giants described a chip that could provide ten times the performance of the latest PC chips and churn through many tasks at once. Aimed squarely at the "digital home" market highly sought-after by Intel Corp., the Cell initiative, which has been in development since 2001, is viewed by some as a formidable, if fledgling, competitor to the world's largest chip maker. While IBM showed off prototypes of the Cell processor here, Intel demonstrated that the Cell chip's grand goals will not go unchallenged, announcing that it had completed initial product runs of its own "dual-core" chips, which have the brains of two chips in one. The Cell chip, developed jointly by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, will appear in the PlayStation 3, the follow-on to Sony's successful video game console that is expected to be released next year. Masakazu Suzuoki, the vice president of microprocessor development at Sony Computer Entertainment, said Sony is "trying to give enough time" to game publishers to write new titles to take advantage of Cell's features. Cell will likely also be marketed as an ideal technology for televisions and supercomputers, and everything in between, though it is still far too early to determine Cell's chances for success in those markets. Kevin Krewell, the editor in chief of Microprocessor Report has called Cell the best chip technology of 2004, but said the key for the chip's success will be the software that is written to take advantage of the chip's features. "The biggest issue is going to be programming," Krewell said. Cell is based on the core of IBM's existing Power processor line, and is designed to work with a variety of software packages, including Linux, the companies said. The chip will have nearly a quarter-billion transistors and be built on 90-nanometer manufacturing technology. It will work with a memory technology developed by Rambus Inc. Inside the chip, eight processing units will churn through data at speeds above 4 gigahertz, or billions of cycles per second, ahead of even the fastest chips from Intel. "It sets a new performance standard," said Jim Kahle, the director of technology for Cell development and an IBM fellow. Sony and IBM have called Cell a strong technology for high-powered workstations and supercomputers, with multiple Cell chips able to work as a cluster. If history is any lesson, Cell is by no means guaranteed to encroach on the most successful microprocessor technology to date, the so-called x86 architecture that is the mainstay of the PC world and the profit center for both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Intel itself once aimed at pushing the x86 technology to the side with a chip called Itanium it developed at great cost with Hewlett-Packard Co. After a cool market reception, the Itanium project drifted away from those grand expectations. Today, Itanium remains a niche product marketed primarily at the relatively limited segment of supercomputers and high-end servers. News Archive | |
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