Smaller Than a Pushpin, More Powerful Than a PC
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 7, 2005
AN FRANCISCO, Feb. 6 - In a new volley in the battle for digital home entertainment, I.B.M., Sony and Toshiba will announce details Monday of their newest microprocessor design, known as Cell, which is expected to offer faster computing performance than microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Anticipation of the announcement, to be made at an industry conference here, has touched off widespread industry speculation over the impact of the new chip technology, which promises to enhance video gaming and digital home entertainment.
Sony plans to use the new Cell in its PlayStation 3, likely to be introduced in 2006, and Toshiba plans to use the chip in advanced high-definition televisions, also to be introduced next year.
However, many industry 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 and at the same time creating a new 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, a computer industry analyst and president of Envisioneering, a market research company in Seaford, N.Y.
The Cell's introduction also comes at a time when 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 and thus 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."
Several computer industry executives warned, however, 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.
The Cell has a modular design based on a slightly less powerful I.B.M. processor that is currently in G5 64-bit desktop computers from Apple Computer. Additionally, the Cell architecture is distinguished by the fact that it controls an array of eight additional processors that the design team refers to as synergistic processing elements, or S.P.E.'s. Each of the S.P.E.'s is a 128-bit processor in its own right.
The Cell has some components that in the lab switch at 5.6 GHz, and several people familiar with the design said that it was both more flexible than is generally understood and that it has been designed with high bandwidth communications, such as high-speed data links to homes, in mind.
"Cell has been optimized for broadband-rich applications," said Jim Kahle, I.B.M.'s director of technology at the Design Center for Cell Technology, the headquarters in Austin, Tex., for the I.B.M., Sony and Toshiba partnership.
He said that I.B.M. 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 I.B.M. 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 I.B.M. The chip will have two PowerPC processor cores, but it will not be as radically new as the I.B.M. Cell design that Sony plans to use, said one executive who is familiar with the Microsoft project.
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 I.B.M. executive in charge of technology development and licenses.
Many industry executives believe that because of its low cost, the Cell is a harbinger of a fundamentally new computing era that will push increasingly into consumer applications.
"I think it will aid in some of the convergence between consumer and corporate I.T. and this will accelerate amazingly from the consumer side," said Andrew Heller, a former I.B.M. processor designer who is now chairman of Heller & Associates, a consulting firm in Austin, Tex.
One area of wide speculation is whether Apple might become a partner in the Cell alliance in the future. Apple is already the largest customer for the PowerPC chip, and it would be simple for the company to take advantage of the Cell design. Several people familiar with Apple's strategy, however, said that the computer maker had yet to be convinced that the Cell technology could provide a significant performance advantage.
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