IBM, Sony, Toshiba have teamed up to create a processor that will cause some major headaches for AMD and Intel. The computer chip, called 'Cell', is 10 times faster than anything on the market now and will eventually power televisions, computers, and other electronics. However, the first application will be Sony's Playstation 3, due next year.
Pros: Very small and very powerful
Cons: Processing units aren't identical, which can cause bugs
Engineers from IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba have spent the past four years working together on creating the Cell, which was unveiled at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, California, yesterday. Initial production of the Cell is expected to begin in the US later this year.
The Cell chip, which is wafer thin and about the size of a postage stamp, will have nine cores and run faster than 4GHz - some 10 times the processing power of similar Intel products. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz. The prototype chip is 221 square-millimeter, integrates 234 million transistors, and is fabricated with 90-nanometer SOI technology. The major benefit of the part is that will help to make personal computers run much faster or eventually make them obsolete by putting their computing power into smaller, handheld products.
Cell will have a 64-bit IBM Power processor and eight 'synergistic processing units' capable of handling separate computing tasks, said Jim Kahle, an IBM Fellow. The Power processor will act as the brain of the chip, running the main operating system for an application and divvying up chores for the other processors. Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), and will have 2.5MB of on-chip memory as well as the ability to shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to 100GB/s, using XDR and FexIO interface technology licensed from Rambus.
The eight 'synergistic' processors are a step forward from current computing system designs, in which the graphics chip draws pixels and the central processor does everything else. The Cell cores have media-specific instructions baked in, but they are flexible and smart enough to handle non-media tasks, said Brian Flachs, an IBM engineer. 'It represents an important middle ground between graphics processors and central processors,' he said.
William Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive at IBM Systems, said: 'Today we see the tangible results of our collaboration: an open, multi-core, microprocessor that portends a new era in graphics and multimedia performance.' Ken Kutaragi, executive deputy president of Sony Corporation and president and chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, said: 'With Cell opening a doorway, a new chapter in computer science is about to begin.'
BIOS, Feb 08, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0)
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