On The Verge

At the ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) this week, IBM, Sony, and Toshiba revealed more details of the Cell processor that among other things will power PlayStation 3. There has been much speculation on Cell, and much of it has been fairly accurate. The design will feature a Power-PC-compatible core along with a SIMD (single instruction multiple data) fed group of eight execution units. The companies claim that Cell will sport 234 million transistors – nearly double the count of Intel’s newest Pentium processors. IBM meanwhile has indicated that it will make workstations based on Cell.

Ironically, much of the hype surrounding the ISSC launch compared Cell to the Pentium architecture used in PCs. And in fact the companies claim Cell offers 10 times the performance of PC processors. So why not put the processor in a PC? If Cell can meet the cost demands of PlayStation it could certainly serve in the PC space.

Perhaps Cell could appear in a future Apple machine. I believe, however, that some in IBM’s camp feel Cell could reestablish the venerable computer company as a leader in the PC space. People forget that IBM will still offer IBM-branded IntelliStation workstations even when Lenovo becomes IBM’s PC brand (see, “MicroChannel sealed IBM’s PC fate.”) Without question, the computational capabilities attributed to Cell would serve well in technical computing applications such as EDA, mechanical rendering, and geothermal applications. But those capabilities would serve equally well in art creation, video processing, and other high-end PC applications.