Smaller Than a Pushpin, More Powerful Than a PC

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

February 7, 2005

Smaller Than a Pushpin, More Powerful Than a PC
 By JOHN MARKOFF 
 

 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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