I got the latest issue of Business 2.0 June 2005, which has a 4 page article on CELL. Here are a few intresting quotes from the article.
"Kutaragi, known for the bold stroke and the grand vision, swung for the fences from the get-go. "We want to do something that has never been done before," he told Davari and a group of IBMers at their first meeting. "let's work together to change the world." The movie The Matrix had just come out, and Kutaragi relished itspremise of a world that is actually a giant computer simulation "Think about creating a crude version of that world," he said, "where millions of people can play in a realistically rendered virtual Tokyo or New Yourk City as if they are really living there." Creating that magical realm, Kutaragi told the team, would require a chip 1,000 times as powerful as the one in the PlayStation 2. The IBMers tried not to roll their eyes. They tended to like all that Matrix stuff, but when it came to 1,000-fold chip boosts, they thought Kutaragi was out of his mind."
"Davari tapped to lead the project was Kahle...He had designed IBM's first dual core chip, the Power4, and was just coming off a project that produced the IBM chip that powers Apple's G5 computers. "I don't want to do the normal stuff," he says with a shrug. Normal obviously want what Kutaragi had in mind. Still, one of Kahle's first moves was to talk Kutaragi down from that fantasy of a 1,000-fold power increase. Kahle figured a goal of a 100- fold boost from one chip generation to the next, having rarely if ever been achieved in the history of semiconductors, was ambitious enough."
"Kutaragi was incredibly demanding and repeatedly sent Kahle back to the drawing board. At one point about a year into the project, Kutaragi made the team scrap the whole system structure and start over nearly from scratch. Another time Kutaragi decided he wanted two more cores. Why? "He just wanted to squeeze the engineering team," expains Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's top Cell engineer, wringing his hands as if strangling a snake. "it hurt your head," Kahle recalls. Making the pain worse: The team still had to deliver the chip on the original schedule."
"To this day, few people even inside the allied companies know the details of Cell's development or the high hopes its backers hold. The Cell engineers are still not supposed to talk about much of their work to anyone outside the Austin facility. One day the air-conditioning broke down in the lab, and as the temperature soared, the engineers propped open the doors. Word got around. The company had to post guards to turn back rubbernecking colleagues eager for a glimpse of what was going on in there."
"IBM, in paticular, says it's making headway in defense, medical imaging, internet switching, and industrial inspection equipment. The company suggests that the chip could be especially useful in crunching the mammoth amounts of data the military will collect as it develops so-called network-centric operations, where heavy armor is replaced by more perfect information--such as torrents of broadband video--that must be processed on the fly."
"Kutaragi, known for the bold stroke and the grand vision, swung for the fences from the get-go. "We want to do something that has never been done before," he told Davari and a group of IBMers at their first meeting. "let's work together to change the world." The movie The Matrix had just come out, and Kutaragi relished itspremise of a world that is actually a giant computer simulation "Think about creating a crude version of that world," he said, "where millions of people can play in a realistically rendered virtual Tokyo or New Yourk City as if they are really living there." Creating that magical realm, Kutaragi told the team, would require a chip 1,000 times as powerful as the one in the PlayStation 2. The IBMers tried not to roll their eyes. They tended to like all that Matrix stuff, but when it came to 1,000-fold chip boosts, they thought Kutaragi was out of his mind."
"Davari tapped to lead the project was Kahle...He had designed IBM's first dual core chip, the Power4, and was just coming off a project that produced the IBM chip that powers Apple's G5 computers. "I don't want to do the normal stuff," he says with a shrug. Normal obviously want what Kutaragi had in mind. Still, one of Kahle's first moves was to talk Kutaragi down from that fantasy of a 1,000-fold power increase. Kahle figured a goal of a 100- fold boost from one chip generation to the next, having rarely if ever been achieved in the history of semiconductors, was ambitious enough."
"Kutaragi was incredibly demanding and repeatedly sent Kahle back to the drawing board. At one point about a year into the project, Kutaragi made the team scrap the whole system structure and start over nearly from scratch. Another time Kutaragi decided he wanted two more cores. Why? "He just wanted to squeeze the engineering team," expains Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's top Cell engineer, wringing his hands as if strangling a snake. "it hurt your head," Kahle recalls. Making the pain worse: The team still had to deliver the chip on the original schedule."
"To this day, few people even inside the allied companies know the details of Cell's development or the high hopes its backers hold. The Cell engineers are still not supposed to talk about much of their work to anyone outside the Austin facility. One day the air-conditioning broke down in the lab, and as the temperature soared, the engineers propped open the doors. Word got around. The company had to post guards to turn back rubbernecking colleagues eager for a glimpse of what was going on in there."
"IBM, in paticular, says it's making headway in defense, medical imaging, internet switching, and industrial inspection equipment. The company suggests that the chip could be especially useful in crunching the mammoth amounts of data the military will collect as it develops so-called network-centric operations, where heavy armor is replaced by more perfect information--such as torrents of broadband video--that must be processed on the fly."
