IBM, Rambus Team on Cell BE
Online staff -- EDN, March 17, 2006
IBM has inked an agreement to license Rambus Inc.’s FlexIO processor bus and XDR memory interface technologies for use in Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processors and companion chips.
Cell BE, as described by IBM when the technology was announced in August 2005, is an architecture that defines a processor structure directed toward distributed processing and multimedia applications. Jointly developed by Big Blue, Toshiba and Sony, the design features eight synergistic processing elements plus a Power Architecture-based core to reach peak performance in excess of 200 GFLOPS.
"This agreement with Rambus is part of IBM's continued focus on our Cell BE-based chipsets in support of our goal of developing an array of leading edge computing products based on the revolutionary Cell BE architecture," said Kevin Carswell, VP of worldwide delivery for IBM Engineering and Technology Services, Technology Collaboration Solutions, in a statement.
The Rambus XDR memory interface and FlexIO processor bus account for 90 percent of the Cell BE processor signal pins, providing an unprecedented aggregate processor I/O bandwidth of approximately 100GBytes/sec., Rambus said.
Meanwhile, the XDR memory interface connecting to XDR DRAMs achieves data rates of 3.2GHz to 8GHz. FlexIO processor buses, formerly codenamed Redwood, are capable of running up to 8GHz data rates, providing bandwidth more than four times faster than best-of-class processor buses available today, the company continued.
"We are pleased to continue our relationship with IBM and its world class engineering team to provide high-bandwidth functionality to new applications enabled by the extraordinary processing power of the Cell BE processor," said Laura Stark, senior VP of platform solutions at Rambus, in the statement. "This agreement gives us a further opportunity to engage with IBM and bring our revolutionary products to the market."
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
