tecoyah

This hold many advantages over todays chips...may be a harbinger of things to come.

IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Tiny Microprocessor


SAN FRANCISCO -- Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power everything from video game consoles to business computers.

Devices built with the processor, code-named Cell, will compete directly with the PC chips that have powered most of the world's personal computers for a quarter century.

Cell's designers say their chip, built from the start with the burgeoning world of rich media and broadband networks in mind, can deliver 10 times the performance of today's PC processors.

It also will not carry the same technical baggage that has made most of today's computers compatible with older PCs. That architectural divergence will challenge the current dominant paradigm of computing that Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. have fostered.

The new chip is expected to be used in Sony Corp.'s next-generation PlayStation game console. Toshiba Corp. plans to incorporate it into high-end televisions. And IBM Corp. has said it will sell a workstation with the chip starting later this year.

Beyond that, companies are remaining coy about where it might be used and whether it will be compatible with older technology.

Supercomputer claims are nothing new in the high-tech industry, and over the years chip and computer companies have steadily improved microprocessor performance even without altering chips' underlying architecture.

And while its competitors may well match the Cell chip in performance by the time it debuts in 2006, it differs considerably from today's processors in constitution.

Cell is comprised of several computing engines, or cores. A core based on IBM's Power architecture controls eight "synergistic" processing centers. In all, they can simultaneously carry out 10 instruction sequences, compared with two for today's Intel chips.

The new microprocessor also is expected to be able to run multiple operating systems and programs at the same time while ensuring each has enough resources. In the home, that could allow for a device that's capable of handling a video game, television and general-purpose computer at once.

"It's very flexible," said Jim Kahle, an IBM fellow. "We support many operating systems with our virtualization technology so we can run multiple operating systems at the same time, doing different jobs on the system."

Later this year, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plan to release their own "multicore" chips, which also increase the number of instructions that can be executed at once. IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. already sell chips with multiple cores, mainly for business servers.

On Monday, Intel announced that it has completed the first product runs of its dual-core processors and said it plans to deliver two separate dual-core Pentium chips and chipsets in the second quarter.

Cell appears to have an advantage in the number of transistors - 234 million compared with 125 million for today's latest Pentium 4 chips. Traditional chip makers, however, have regularly doubled their number of transistors every 12 to 18 months.

Cell is said to run at clock speeds greater than 4 gigahertz, which would top the 3.8 GHz of Intel's current top-speed chip.

Cell's designers said they are running a variety of operating systems on the processor at their lab in Austin, Texas. But they would not say whether Microsoft's Windows is one of them. In fact, they only confirmed running Linux, the open source environment.


The PC industry has seen a long line of chips attempt to usurp the x86 architecture pioneered by Intel that dominates today's computers. But all have failed, and Intel remains the world's largest chip maker.

In the 1990s, IBM, Motorola Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. pushed the PowerPC architecture. Though it's still used by the Apple Macintosh as well as IBM workstations and servers, it failed to dethrone Intel.

Most recently, Transmeta Corp.'s Crusoe was supposed to challenge Intel's dominance in notebooks. Launched at the twilight of the tech boom in 2000, it gained only marginal acceptance and the company is now considering plans to focus on licensing its patents.

Intel has since developed its own mobile chip technology, Centrino.

"Transmeta was also a disruptive influence in the market. And because of Transmeta, we've got Centrino and the advances that have happened in mobile computing," said Steve Kleynhans, a Meta Group analyst. "Unfortunately, we don't really have Transmeta anymore."

For a challenger to succeed in displacing x86, it will have to perform considerably better since it also will break computing's long-standing tradition of backward and forward compatibility, said Justin Rattner, who oversees Intel's Corporate Technology Group.

"They're going to have to show they're able to do things that conventional architectures at least at the moment are incapable of doing," he said. "That's the fundamental question."

The Cell's specifications also suggest the PlayStation 3 will offer realistic graphics and strong performance. But analysts cautioned that not all the features in a product announcement will find their way into all systems built on the device.

"Any new technology like this has two components," Kleynhans said. "It has the vision of what it could be because you need the big vision to sell it. Then there's the reality of how it's really going to be used, which generally several levels down the chain from there."

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=125597

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Lasereth

The only thing wrong with this article is how the author seems to portray the chip as being a new technology to revolutionize the computing industry. While it is innovative and really high-tech, it was not designed for desktop computers. It was designed for the Playstation 3, plain and simple. They sort of add the Playstation 3 capabilities on to the end of the article even though the Cell chip was designed just for the PS3. Production began on that chip years ago when Sony announced the PS3, long before the PS2 concept drawings were even out.

It's amazing technology, but it really deserves to be attributed to its sole purpose: the Playstation 3.

-Lasereth

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ChrisJericho

I have one..... but i bent a pin.

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Sleepyjack

Here's a pseudo-technical article about the Cells technology.

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html

It's an interesting read into what the architecutre of the cell chip is going to be like. And as for only being for the PS3, a friend made an interesting observation that IBM just sold off they're desktop/laptop division - the whole lot to a Chinese company, along with the rights to use the IBM brand name for the next 3 years. So now the only x86 machines they're selling are to the top end / server market.

While probably a smart move in itself considering the low margins in the PC market, but in light of this new processor architecture, possibly a move to make room for a new range of PCs? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...004Dec7_2.html

Wingless

The name of the chip - "Cell" makes me think of The Matrix or i, Robot, or The Terminator.

This is how it starts... Skynet is launched, 01 is created, downfall of humanity, Will Smith saves us all... Thanks alot Sony

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Rawb

Yeah, if you read the technical specs, you can tell that it was designed specifically for the PS3.

It's a cool design, but not one for a general purpose computer. What it basically boils down to is that it has a non-superscalar powerpc chip at the reins (think of it as a simplified G3), with eight mini-computers (processor and ram) with an extremely high speed on-chip interconnect. The main processor cannot execute instructions out of order, and has the possibilty of executing up to two instructions at once, so it is on par with the original Pentium.

Now those eight sub-processors are where cool things are going to happen. Each of them has 256K of ram and DMA access to the rest of memory. They also basically run independantly of the main processor. I've not read a lot on the actual capabilities of these sub-processors, but from what I have read, they have no idea about virtual memory, or the MMU, so in a multi-user OS, these would be able to read and write directly to main memory with no restrictions (so letting users access these things directly would be very bad). But for a platform like the PS3, they have a huge amount of potential. You could have your physics engine running on a few of these, your animation engine running on more of these (and the physics engine could talk to the animation engine directly, over the high-speed on processor interconnect), your AI running on another, your sound running on yet another. Basically, if these things have a wide enough instruction set to be used for generic computing, they will be amazing for games.

To summarize, in two words: I'm excited.

skaven

One thing I saw somebody suggest in a discussion about cell processors stuck me as a very good idea: Why limit cell processors to being simply general-purpose processors? Imagine a PCI-X card that has a couple cell processors on it. With the appropriate drivers, programs (like 3D games, media encoders/decoders, etc) could send work to the cell card that it is best at, while keeping the x86 backend for the general-purpose work. Since cell is designed to be so scalable, if you need more power, just plug in another card. An application like this could theoretically render the GPU market obsolete. Motherboards would come with a high-speed frame buffer (basically a block of RAM mapped to pixels on the screen), and you'd buy cell cards to handle your 3D graphics. With a fast interconnect (possibly a special slot akin to AGP) that has a direct connection to the onboard framebuffer, it would make upgrading your "video card" a much less costly task! No more clunky SLI or slot-restricted upgrades. Buy a cell card, and when the latest game is too much, just buy another one and add to your existing horsepower.

::dreams:: man...that would rock so hard.

bingle

Well, that's one of its main purposes, but not the ONLY one. Sony has already said they'll be putting it in a vareity of devices, including high-end TVs, and Intel and Toshiba wouldn't be involved unless they saw other future applications for it. In fact, I read an article recently that suggested it would be great for scientific computing (which does a lot of floating-point stuff), or if application design is restructured, even as a general-purpose PC processor.

Of course, there's the rub: just like in the Emotion Engine, Sony's made the processor fast by making it simple, which moves a lot of the hard work into the software. In order to really get PC-like support for it, someone would need to design an operating system that abstracts the details of farming out work to the sub-processors.

But it's still plausible that it could grab some more general computing applications, simply because PCs have to go *somewhere* - Intel's been stuck speedwise for a while now, and multi-core chips look like they're the future of any power increases we're going to see. So applications and OSes have to start getting more multithreaded anyway - why not go the Cell route instead of the two-core Pentium route? The initial learning curve might be greater, but since you can just add more and more Cells in a modular fashion, it's got more growth potential than Intel's method.

Bingle

merlin

i would definately like to see this in pcs, it'd make some pretty kick-ass systems. but for now, i'm happy to see it in the ps3...can't wait