IBM, Sony, Toshiba to Reveal ‘Superbrain Chip’

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics. The Cell microprocessor has been under development by the three companies since 2001 in a laboratory in Austin, Texas. Its unveiling at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been eagerly awaited and products containing Cell including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are expected as early as next year. Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by the consortium's competitors, Intel and AMD. The two leading chipmakers are just moving from 32-bit to 64-bit computing and to dual-core processors essentially two “brains” on a single chip.Cell is understood to have at least four cores and be significantly faster than Intel and AMD chips. “This is probably going to be one of the biggest industry announcements in many years,” said Richard Doherty, president of the Envisioneering research firm. “It's going to breathe new life into the industry and trigger fresh competition.” Cell is being presented as an architecture capable of wide-ranging functions and powerful parallel processing that will allow it to distribute its work among the different cores in order to perform many tasks at once. Full Story - [Financial Times.com]