IBM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal ‘superbrain chip’
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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.
 
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6b31ebfe-786b-11d9-9961-00000e2511c8.html
 
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If this kind of computer power is ready for commercial use, PlayStation 3 toys
will be the least of our worries. This technological advance brings the world
much closer to the sort of distributed network that will be ultimately used by
the not-so-friendly folks of the Antichrist's Information Technology Department.
 
Regards,
 
Fort Stone