OT: New Microchip

["Tracey Gardner" <tracey.gardner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By David Derbyshire, Consumer Affairs Editor
(Filed: 08/02/2005)

A microchip so powerful that it could turn mobile phones into pocket-sized
desktop computers was unveiled yesterday by Sony, Toshiba and IBM.
Ten times faster than its rivals, the new Cell microprocessor is being
billed as the world's first "super computer on a chip".
The new chip will be appear in the new Sony Playstation 3

A single Cell processor packs such a powerful punch that only three years
ago it would have been rated as one of the top 500 super computers in the
world.

The chips, which are initially intended for the lucrative computer games
market, will appear in the new Sony Playstation 3 games console due out
next
year.
They are also expected to be used in new high definition televisions from
Sony and Toshiba and be added to home and office computers soon after.

Yesterday's announcement was one of the most eagerly anticipated in the
electronics industry for years.
The Cell is expected seriously to challenge the dominance of Intel and
Advanced Micro Devices, the world's leading producers of computer
processors.
The three electronic giants, which have been working on the Cell technology
at a laboratory in Austin, Texas, for three years, say it will bridge the
gap between the cinema and video games - allowing graphics and special
effects designed for the cinema to be inserted directly into computer
games.

Details of the chip were released at the International Solid State Circuits
Conference in San Francisco.
Klaus Gottschalk, a senior IT architect at IBM, said the new chip was
between 10 and 20 times faster than the best processors available today. He
predicted that it would be widely used in electronics around the home.
"It is a super computer on a chip," he said. "In the
beginning it will be
targeted at the consumer electronics market - for game consoles and home
computers."
But it would soon start to appear in personal computers, he said.
"If it was embedded in a mobile phone, it would run everything that
you have
today on a personal computer," he added.

The chip's specifications have astonished computer experts. The size of a
postage stamp, it contains 10 separate processing units, compared to the
normal one. That allows the Cell to carry out 10 tasks simultaneously -
copying the "grid" system of super computers. It runs at 4 GHz -
twice the
speed of the Pentium 4 processor.
When put inside powerful computer servers, the Cell consortium expects it
to
be capable of handling 16 trillion "floating point operations",
or
calculations, every second.
Ken Kutaragi, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said: "A
new
chapter in computer science is about to begin."