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Cell Chip Design: The Start of a New Computing Era?

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 12:00 CST

In a new volley in the battle for digital home entertainment, IBM, Sony and Toshiba announced details Monday of their newest microprocessor design, known as Cell, which offers faster computing performance than microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

Anticipation of the announcement had touched off speculation over the impact of the new chip technology, which promises to enhance video gaming and digital home entertainment.

Sony plans to use the Cell in its PlayStation 3, which is likely to be introduced in 2006, and Toshiba plans to use the chip in advanced high-definition televisions, also to be introduced next year.

But many executives and analysts say that Cell's impact may ultimately be much broader, staving off the PC industry's efforts to dominate the digital living room while creating a digital computing ecosystem that includes Hollywood, the living room and high- performance scientific and engineering markets.

"There is a new game in town, and it will revive an industry that has been kind of sleepy for the last few years," said Richard Doherty, president of Envisioneering, a market research company.

The Cell's introduction also comes as the computer industry has largely given up investing in fundamentally new processor designs and has instead chosen to use the additional space available on the newest generation of chips to place multiple processors to add performance.

The Cell chip, computer experts said, could have a theoretical peak performance of 256 billion mathematical operations per second. With that much processing power, the chip would have placed among the top 500 supercomputers on a list maintained by scientists at the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee as recently as June 2002.

"This is extremely impressive," said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report, an industry technical publication, "and it proves that architectural innovation isn't dead."

But several executives said that despite the Cell's impressive specifications, success is not guaranteed for any new design in the computer industry. For example, Intel and Hewlett-Packard have spent more than a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars on the Itanium, and the chip has yet to find a receptive market.

Several people familiar with the Cell's design said that it was more flexible than was generally understood and that it had been designed to work with high bandwidth communications, like high- speed data links to homes.

"Cell has been optimized for broadband-rich applications," said Jim Kahle, the International Business Machines director of technology at the Design Center for Cell Technology, the headquarters in Austin, Texas, for the IBM-Sony-Toshiba partnership.

He said that IBM had refined a technology, also being developed by Intel, called virtualization, which is designed to isolate applications from one another.

Originally used in mainframe computing applications, the technology is now being exploited by consumer electronics designers to run demanding applications like video decompression and decryption simultaneously.

One significant risk for Sony and IBM is that the Sony PlayStation 3 game machine is likely to be introduced later than the next generation of Xbox from Microsoft. The PlayStation 2 beat the Xbox to market, and Microsoft was never able to catch up, meaning that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars on its bet on the video game market.

In its next version of the Xbox, Microsoft plans to shift from using Pentium chips from Intel to a PowerPC microprocessor from IBM. The chip will have two PowerPC processors, but it will not be as radically new as the Cell design that Sony plans to use, one executive familiar with the Microsoft project said.

That will make for a fascinating rivalry: Sony is betting that its computer horsepower advantage will be large enough to give it a quality advance over Microsoft, even if it arrives late.

"Our goal with the Cell is to be an order of magnitude faster," said Lisa Su, an IBM executive in charge of technology development and licenses.

Many executives said they believed that because of its relatively low cost, the Cell was a harbinger of a fundamentally new computing era that would push increasingly into consumer applications.

"I think it will aid in some of the convergence between consumer and corporate IT, and this will accelerate amazingly from the consumer side," said Andrew Heller, referring to information technology. Heller, a former IBM processor designer, is chairman of Heller & Associates, a consulting firm in Austin, Texas.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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