14 DAY TRIAL // IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled more details about the much awaited Cell processor, which producers claim will change what we now know as powerful PCs, no matter if they run on Intel or AMD cores.
The ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) was the event that the three companies thought as perfect to let attendees know more about their glorious processor.
The prototype shown at the conference is based on Power architecture, integrates nine cores and runs at "more than 4 GHz". The chip is likely to be integrated first with Sony's game console PlayStation 3.
The "operating system neutral" chip is manufactured in 90 nm SOI (Silicon On Insulator), has a 221 mm2 footprint and harbors 234 million transistors. This compares to about 125 million transistors of the current Pentium 4 processor, which measures 122 mm2. The basic structure of the chip is comprised out of one 64-bit PowerPC chip and eight "synergistic processing units" (SPEs), the processor will integrate 32 kByte L1 and 512 kByte L2 cache, while the SPEs will use 256 KByte cache.
The memory and memory interface for the chip is designed by Rambus and will be built around the firm's FlexIO processor bus interface and XDR memory. Rambus will also contribute to PlayStation 3, because the XDR memory Samsung recently introduced incorporate Rambus' Differential Rambus Signal Level (DRSL) technology. XDR is held to be a strong contender for inclusion in Sony's PlayStation 3. The aggregate processor bandwidth of the Cell processor is estimated to top 100 GByte per second.
According to IBM and Sony, Cell is targeted to become a "broadband processor" for industrial applications and the "digital home".