IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Supercomputer On A Chip

TECH SPACE

The "operating system neutral" chip is manufactured in 90 nm SOI, has a 221 mm2 footprint and integrates 234 million transistors. This compares to about 125 million transistors of the current Pentium 4 processor, which measures 122 mm2.

San Francisco (AFP) Feb 07, 2005
IBM, Sony and Toshiba on Monday unveiled what they called a "supercomputer on a chip" targeted at the burgeoning market for new, more powerful electronics and other devices including the Sony PlayStation.

The so-called Cell chip was unveiled at the International Sold State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, where representatives from the three companies were on hand to discuss its technological workings.

Built on technology from IBM's Power processor, the new chip contains multiple processing cores and can act like more than one chip at any given time. Because of its potential power, Cell is being touted as the equivalent of supercomputer on a single chip.

Consumers are likely to get their first experience with Cell next year when Sony uses it in the PlayStation 3 game console. However, the chip is expected to be marketed for use in other high-end consumer electronics such as televisions and home entertainment systems, as well as in business-level supercomputers.

Cell's release is seen by some industry watchers as a potential threat to Intel's dominance of the desktop microprocessor market.

Intel meanwhile was expected to show off a new version of its Itanium chip, which contains more than 1.7 billion transistors in a dual-core design meant to boost overall processing performance.

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TECH SPACE

Wisconsin-Madison Selects SGI For More Accurate Weather Forecasting

San Diego CA (SPX) Jan 14, 2005
To produce test datasets to support the design of future hyperspectral satellite instruments, the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) - an arm of the Space Science & Engineering Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison - purchased from Silicon Graphics a supercomputer in October 2004 to run highly sophisticated weather simulations.

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