Cell: a whole new industry
p2pnet.net News Feature - Any doubts that the new IBM, Sony, Toshiba axis that has formed around the Cell chip, was a wholehearted attempt at stealing away the entire PC and server chip market, was eliminated this week, as they revealed more and more of the architecture.
Analysts have said in the past that the Cell was only designed for high end parallel processing applications and that it could never replace a PC. But they have only to look at the previous generation of the IBM chip, the Power 5, and the power it is delivery inside Apple’s G5 servers.
IBM, Sony and Toshiba, partners in the forthcoming Cell chip gave out more details of the architecture this week and promised a detailed view at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this coming February in San Francisco.
Chief new facts they have revealed are that it will run multiple operating systems, from thin consumer electronics versions (of Linux?), to full bloodied workstations and IBM said it will have its first commercial chip run in the first half of 2005. It has already placed a sample chip inside a workstation and driven it in a minimal configuration at 16 teraflops (16 trillion floating point operations per second). This is targeted at compute intensive applications such as physics calculations, and also content applications such as HDTV digital film creation and game creation.
And it is clear that the ambitious schedule that the trio laid out 18 months ago hasn’t slipped and everything about the Cell is on track. The 64 bit chip architecture will be launched in Sony products, starting with a home server for broadband content and a High Definition TV, both due in 2006. Toshiba also expects to launch its first Cell-based high-definition television in 2006. Sony has made it clear that its next generation gaming console, usually dubbed the PlayStation 3, will be based on the chip as well.
We already know that the Cell chip is made up of multiple cores, up to 8 in total, and that each of these are served by up to 8 slave processors, making a total of 72 processing cores in the top end chip. Now IBM is saying that clusters of these chips can also be put together to create completely new supercomputer class performance.
However the first generation of Cell chips will now be implemented in 90 nanometer geometry, using IBM’s “copper” silicon on insulator process. We had originally thought that 65 nanometer devices would be made.
Sony last year pledged support to the tune of $1.6 billion spent over three years, to making the chip a reality and will be making it in Japan, with supports chips coming from Toshiba, after the initial runs from IBM’s East Fishkill, New York plant.
IBM listed other features of the chip saying it was multi-threaded, has substantial (it doesn’t say quite how much) bus bandwidth to and from main memory, a full set of companion chips, flexible on-chip I/O interface, real-time resource management for real-time applications, and most importantly on-chip hardware in support of security systems for intellectual property protection.
This will mean that simple digital rights management software could rely on a concrete identification of each Cell processor and content usage authentication can be based on that. This would be a step beyond the current PC architecture, which has only toyed with a similar idea, and will mean a rush for the big content companies to support Cell based devices.
Every Sony PlayStation 3 game designer will need to buy some kind of Cell-based workstation, and within a year of launch Cell devices are likely to knock Sun Microsystems of the top spot in workstations, and generate a whole new industry around digital editing and manipulation of HDTV programming.
We would expect an Apple implementation of that technology with its film making software to be on the roadmap somewhere. Apple’s big servers for manipulating digital content are already built on IBM technology.
Peter White – Faultline, UK
===================
See:-
Cell chip - PlayStation 3 ‘The Cell’ chip, p2pnet, November 29, 2004
December 4th, 2004 at 4:43 am
What I’m looking for is 1080p HDTV streaming via broadband. Bundle internet broadband and TV broadcasting and pay one low monthly bill – like the new internet and IP phone bundle. No more everlasting downloads, no more crappy streaming, just crystal clear Hi-def content from my Cell based SONY HDTV and home server.
And while I’m at it, I can program my home server (which hopefully doubles as a PVR) to record a whole days worth of HD programing on my Blu-ray Disc. I imagine a 1080p webcam with IP telephony, talking to relatives across the globe on my 50″ HDTV. Can the Cell processor make my dream a reality by say year ‘08?
If the chip can work a Playstation, then I hope the workstations will also be reasonably priced. The current $20k uncompressed HD editing systems are out of reach for the indie-editor. And if it’s cheap enough for a gaming console why not a PC? I think its broadband capabilities will be the biggest selling point for the average consumer. If the price is right – ditch your Pentium!