Sony, Toshiba and IBM (STI) said today that IBM is ready to begin pilot production in 2005 on their jointly-designed “Cell” processor.
The Cell consortium was formed in 2001. The Cell is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design with an architecture that will be able to use ultra high-speed broadband connectivity to interoperate with one another as one complete system.
The first product to use the Cell will be a workstation PC jointly developed by Sony and IBM and set to go on sale in 2005. Sony also confirmed the Cell will power the next version of its market-leading PlayStation game console. Both Sony and Toshiba expect to begin selling high-definition TV sets powered by the Cell in 2006
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
The IBM announcement says in part:
Specifically, the companies confirmed that Cell is a multicore chip comprising a 64-bit Power processor core and multiple synergistic processor cores capable of massive floating point processing. Cell is optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications, including computer entertainment, movies and other forms of digital content.
The current PS2 operates at 6.2 GFLOPS and 75 million plygons per second (max).
The specs for a Cell-based PS3 are anyone’s guess. Those guesses range from 256 GFLOPS & 6 billion polygons per second, ranging to the PS3 being 1,000x as powerful as the PS2…which would put the PS3 in the class of “supercomputer”.
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Sweet…. This is what I’m looking for
Never knew there was a Playstation console that was Cell-powered, but I’m impressed.