push-pin sized supercomputer unveiled
Correspondent:: "nu-monet v7.0"
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 19:28:16 -0700
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http://tinyurl.com/5wsos
Semiconductor designers from International Business
Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the
inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they
claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia
and consumer electronics.
The Cell microprocessor has been under development
by the three companies since 2001 in a laboratory in
Austin, Texas.
Its unveiling at the International Solid State
Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been
eagerly awaited and products containing Cell
including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are
expected as early as next year.
Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly
more powerful and versatile than the next generation
of micro-processors announced by the consortium's
competitors, Intel and AMD.
The two leading chipmakers are just moving from
32-bit to 64-bit computing and to dual-core
processors essentially two “brains” on a single
chip. Cell is understood to have at least four cores
and be significantly faster than Intel and AMD chips.
“This is probably going to be one of the biggest
industry announcements in many years,” said Richard
Doherty, president of the Envisioneering research
firm. “It's going to breathe new life into the
industry and trigger fresh competition.”
Cell is being presented as an architecture capable
of wide-ranging functions and powerful parallel
processing that will allow it to distribute its
work among the different cores in order to perform
many tasks at once.
The consortium says this will improve the quality
of video delivered over the broadband internet and
increase the fidelity of computer games. The Cell
developers have already produced a prototype of a
computer workstation with supercomputer capabilities.
High-definition TVs from Sony and Toshiba, a Sony
home server for broadband content and the
PlayStation 3 all featuring Cell are due to appear
in 2006.
Cell's architecture is described as scalable from
“small consumer devices to massive supercomputers”.
The consortium's rivals have questioned whether
Cell's potential can be realised and are working
on alternative multi-tasking methods. Intel has
just brought forward to this year the release on
desktop PCs of virtualisation technology known as
Vanderpool. This can split a microprocessor into
any number of virtual processors to perform
different tasks across a network from a central
location.
IBM is expected to begin pilot production of the
Cell chip at its 300mm wafer plant in New York
state in the first half of this year.
--
"Mars was destroyed with weapons from the future.
There, does that make you feel any better?"
-- nu-monet