AfterDawn: News

Sony, Toshiba and IBM have unveiled the new Cell processor which they are calling a "supercomputer in a chip". The chip is so small it could power anything from video games consoles to mobile phones. It tops clock speeds of greater than 4GHz, the companies claimed. The new chip is expected to power Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console. Toshiba plans to incorporate it into high-end televisions and IBM has said it will sell a workstation with the chip starting later this year. The developers claim the chip can deliver 10 times the performance of today’s best processors.

Cell is comprised of several cores. A core based on IBM's Power architecture controls eight synergistic processing centres. In all, they can simultaneously carry out 10 instruction sequences, compared with two for today's Intel chips. It can also run multiple operating systems simultaneously and multiple programs and still ensure that each has enough resources to run properly.



"It's very flexible," said Jim Kahle, IBM Director of Technology for Cell Technology. "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." Intel is expected to release its multicore chips later this year. The will also increase the number of instructions that can be executed at once.

The Cell designers say they are running several operating systems on the processor in their lab, but did not mention whether or not they were running Microsoft Windows on it but did confirm running Linux on it.

Sources:
I4U
keralanext.com
ABC

Written by: James Delahunty @ 8 Feb 2005 1:33