Details on Sony's PlayStation 3 chip IBM, Sony, and Toshiba have wrapped up the design for the inner workings of a mysterious new chip called "Cell." The new multimedia processor called "
Cell," touted as a "supercomputer on a chip," is well on the way to completion, IBM says. As previously
reported,the chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3, and elements of its design are expected in future server chips from IBM.
The design for
Cell has is nearly complete. Soon the chip layout will be handed over to engineers in manufacturing, who will craft samples. Meanwhile, the engineers have been testing various elements of the processor, both separately and together, before the manufacturing unit connects them inside actual
Cell chips. At this rate, commercial production of
Cell could come as soon as the end of 2004.
The processor's design is still under wraps, but the companies say
Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver one trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. With integer math, it will have the ability to do more than 1 teraflop, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz.
While details remain vague,
Cell will differ from existing microprocessors in that it will have multiple personalities. The chip will not only perform the heavy computational tasks required for graphics, but it will also contain the circuitry to handle high-bandwidth communications and run multiple devices, sources say. This would be possible because a single chip will contain multiple processing cores, or cells--an esoteric design concept that's rapidly emerging from the labs, according to sources. Communications features expected to be in the chips might also allow devices to form powerful, peer-to-peer networks, some analysts believe.
Cell will likely use between four and 16 general-purpose processor cores per chip. A game console might use a chip with 16 cores, while a less complicated device like a set-top box would have a processor with fewer, said Peter Glaskowsky, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report. Some of these cores might perform computational functions, while others could control audio or graphics. But not everyone thinks this approach is groundbreaking, given that some processors already use inter-chip multiprocessing. "I just don't see that
Cell is revolutionary, except in its marketing impact," Glaskowsky said.
The processor has always been associated with Sony's PlayStation 3 and peer-to-peer computing, but it will do more than allow players to battle opposing characters in multiplayer Internet games, according to Jim Kahle, director of broadband processor technology and a research fellow at IBM. But
Cell will go "beyond gaming to just entertainment in general," Kahle said.
From his own analysis, Doherty believes
Cell will create a new extensible computing platform. A set-top box containing a
Cell chip could, for example, combine to share processing power with a
Cell-powered high-definition television to render the graphics of an animated movie. "It's like a beehive--
cell components can also be ganged together," he said.
While
Cell's hardware design might be difficult, it's creating software for the chip that will be the trickiest part of establishing it in the market. Creating an operating system and a set of applications that can take advantage of the
Cell's multiprocessing and peer-to-peer computing capabilities will be the key to determining if
Cell will be successful. Knowing this, the three chip partners have so far set a goal of crafting
Cell as a system, creating operating system and application software alongside the
Cell hardware.
Cell's designers are engineering the chip to work with a wide range of operating systems, including Linux.
But IBM, Sony, and Toshiba are also working together to develop a purpose-built
Cell operating system and applications, which
Cell's developers will use to test the chip's various features, such as its multimedia processing capabilities. They are also likely to form the basis of a
Cell software development kit and also the
Cell OS and applications for end devices such as game systems, sources said.
While much of the work on
Cell is complete, there's still a lot left to do. Together, the hardware and software teams will continue testing the chip's inner workings. The last stage of development work, which still lies ahead, includes completing circuit layout and then eventually testing actual sample chips.
IBM is expected to begin manufacturing
Cell as soon as 2004 or early 2005. But as with many other details about the chip, Kahle will confirm only that the
Cell project is on track to meet its 2005 introduction, which was set forth at its initial announcement. The rest of the chip's schedule is a secret, at least for now, he said.
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