The Cell CPU Runs at 6 GHz

Thankfully, not everything in the world of IT is related to CES. While this statement is a bit odd, it shows that not every producer or manufacturer is interested of showcasing its products at CES, especially if the products I speak of are not entirely commercial. It is one thing to see a 3GHz eye-catcher Conroe and a totally different thing to see an 80-core CPU designed for server use. You might like how "80-core CPU" sounds but it's simply not for you.

Integrated circuit designers have their own version of CES and it is called IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). This year's meeting will be held in February in San Francisco and promises to bring some surprises in the CPU area such as a next-generation Cell processor as well as AMD's quad-core Opteron and Intel's 80-core monster CPU.

The updated Cell being manufactured under 65nm process already runs at 6GHz (1.3V) in STI's labs and is rumored to be powered by two PSUs needed to increase SRAM stability as well as performance. However STI promises that actual logic power consumption will decrease especially when the transition to 45 and 32nm occurs. At the moment Cell runs inside the PS3 at 3.2GHz and is manufactured under 90nm process.

Intel seems to possess a working 80-core processor which has evolved since the first one presented at the 2006 Fall IDF conference. The processor, which was initially clocked at 3.1 GHz at IDF now works at 4GHz and comes with 20 MB of SRAM. Performance climbed from a claimed 1 TFlops at the IDF to 1.28 TFlops for the 4GHz version. And all that computing power comes with a typical TDP of only 98W.

As for AMD, all we know is that they will be bringing Barcelona with them. The first native quad core still holds a lot of secrets, but we were told that it uses a modified Opteron dual core design. The company should also unveil a roadmap that regards the transition to DDR3.