Super Cell
Thu Jan 27, 6:34 PM ET
By Benjamin Fulford David Whelan
One of the most gossiped-about and eagerly awaited technologies of 2005 is a powerful microprocessor called Cell. Produced by a consortium of Sony, Toshiba and IBM, Cell will be the brains of the next-generation Sony PlayStation 3, due out in 2006. If its builders' advance hype is right, Cell promises a new era of graphics-rich computers, as well as TVsets and home theaters capable of processing and moving large volumes of high-definition content. "Cell will make possible a transformation in entertainment like that from novels to movies,"says Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment. Technical details will be released Feb. 6 at a conference in San Francisco.
We've managed to glean some inside tidbits. A single Cell chip is expected to be capable of surpassing 250 billion floating point operations, or 250 gigaflops, per second, rivaling the best mid-1990s supercomputer. In flops, it is six times as fast as Nvidia's new graphics chip.
"It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is in its flexibility."Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.
Each Cell chip will have between eight and ten separate processing cores on one piece of silicon (a final decision is pending), compared to two for the latest Pentium chips.
Intel is watching Cell warily, but Intel spokesman Howard High says that while the chip may be successful in videogame consoles, he doubts it would reverberate beyond into the realm of PC computers. "The Japanese tend to shoot high in terms of their goals. So far they haven't had a successful general-purpose microprocessor," says High.
The Cell chip will go into production by midyear at IBM's East Fishkill, N.Y. wafer factory. Sony and IBM have announced plans for a workstation combining multiple Cells that, acting in concert, will reach 16 trillion flops, ranking alongside the world's top ten supercomputers. It will be aimed at engineers and Hollywood animators. This figure is "probably a p.r. exaggeration," the Cell engineer says, but future workstations containing racks of 32 chips will be able to attain this speed. Toshiba has plans for a Cell-based hi-def TVset in 2006.
Cell's big public debut will likely wow conference attendees with very fast graphics and multimedia applications on a prototype computer. "You couldn't imagine how fast it will be," says the inside engineer. "It will be able to make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff needed to produce such quality,"he says.
One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors are squeezed even closer together than the 90-nanometer production process that Intel uses and that the Cell consortium has claimed to have been using so far. The denser a chip's transistors, the more powerful the chip can be. "For Intel, it would be a big shock," promises the engineer.
