Listening to Talk of Iowa this morning revealed Sony, IBM and Toshiba have formally presented the inner workings of their 'Cell' microprocessor at the International Solid State Circuits Conference. 8 cores, 10 instructions per cycle, it's been tested with operating systems, it will be the heart of Sony's Playstation 3, and it will debut at speeds OVER 4GHz. Recommended Reading: Cell Architechture Expalined More Details: InformationWeek The Register

Comments

heavy pie
Tue, 02/08/2005 - 17:03
Woo!
That's pretty neat, in my opinion. I'm still rockin' my 2.4GHz Athlon XP and probably won't be upgrading for quite some time seeing as how I'm only moderately taxing my system most of the time. But it's still neat! I was actually going to send you a link, but with everybody talking about it... (note the sarcastic italices)
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bruce42
Wed, 02/09/2005 - 10:43
Of course
You should really check out the "Recommended Reading" link. The key part of this news is not the immediate application of the Cell, but rather it's awesome potential to reshape the PC corporate landscape. Consider this: Cell will accelerate many commonly used applications by ludicrous proportions compared to PCs. Intel could put 10 cores on a chip and they'll match neither it's performance or price. The APUs are dedicated vector processors, x86 are not. The x86 cores will no doubt include the SSE vector units but these are no match for even a single APU. One Cell microprocessor has EIGHT APU's. The PS3 will have FOUR Cells.
This brand makes the thing which a consumer is satisfied with. - engrish.com

heavy pie
Wed, 02/09/2005 - 14:59
Indeed
Ah, but I have checked out the "Recommended Reading" link. Imagine, if Apple aquires Tivo, they could easily incorporate Cell technology into a home entertainment system. TV, DVD, VCR, Stereo, and a PC all in your living room and with the power of a super computer! The heart of the Playstation3 will be a new chip (or rather chip set) developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. The companies will collectively invest more than $400 million in the next five years to design a "supercomputer-on-a-chip" for the PS3. The name for this technology is "grid" (formerly called "cell") and appears to be targeted squarely at the possibilities of parallel and distributed computing over the internet. That's a fair investment in the Playstation 3.
+ That's The Spirit of RESCUE,MANHOOD/ - engrish.com