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Chip breaks with past

The designers say the Cell is superpowerful and can run multiple operating systems.

SAN FRANCISCO - Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power everything from video game consoles to business computers.

Devices built with the processor, code-named Cell, will compete directly with the PC chips that have powered most of the world's personal computers for a quarter century.

Cell's designers say their chip, built from the start with the burgeoning world of rich media and broadband networks in mind, can deliver 10 times the performance of today's PC processors.

It also will not carry the same technical baggage that has made most of today's computers compatible with older PCs. That architectural divergence will challenge the dominant paradigm of computing Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. have fostered.

The new chip is expected to be used in Sony Corp.'s next-generation PlayStation game console. Toshiba Corp. plans to incorporate it into high-end televisions. And IBM Corp. has said it will sell a workstation with the chip starting this year.

Beyond that, companies are remaining coy about where it might be used and whether it will be compatible with older technology.

Supercomputer claims are nothing new in the high-tech industry, and over the years chip and computer companies have steadily improved microprocessor performance even without altering chips' underlying architecture.

And while its competitors may well match the Cell chip in performance by the time it debuts in 2006, it differs considerably from today's processors in constitution.

Cell is composed of several computing engines, or cores. A core based on IBM's Power architecture controls eight "synergistic" processing centers. They can simultaneously carry out 10 instruction sequences, compared with two for today's Intel chips.

The new microprocessor also is expected to be able to run multiple operating systems and programs at the same time while ensuring each has enough resources. In the home, that could allow for a device that's capable of handling a video game, television and general-purpose computer at once.

"It's very flexible," said Jim Kahle, an IBM fellow. "We support many operating systems with our virtualization technology so we can run multiple operating systems at the same time, doing different jobs on the system."

This year, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plan to release their "multicore" chips, which increase the number of instructions that can be executed at once. IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. sell chips with multiple cores, mainly for business servers.

On Monday, Intel said it has completed the first product runs of its dual-core processors and said it plans to deliver two separate dual-core Pentium chips and chipsets in the second quarter.

Cell appears to have an advantage in the number of transistors - 234-million compared with 125-million for today's latest Pentium 4 chips. Traditional chipmakers, however, have regularly doubled their number of transistors every 12 to 18 months.

Cell is said to run at clock speeds greater than 4 gigahertz, which would top the 3.8 GHz of Intel's top-speed chip.

Cell's designers said they are running a variety of operating systems on the processor at their lab in Austin, Texas.

But they would not say whether Microsoft's Windows is one of them. They confirmed running Linux, the open source environment.

The PC industry has seen a long line of chips attempt to usurp the x86 architecture pioneered by Intel that dominates today's computers. But all have failed, and Intel remains the world's largest chipmaker.

For a challenger to succeed in displacing x86, it will have to perform considerably better since it will break computing's long-standing tradition of backward and forward compatibility, said Justin Rattner, who oversees Intel's Corporate Technology Group.

"They're going to have to show they're able to do things that conventional architectures at least at the moment are incapable of doing," he said. "That's the fundamental question."

[Last modified February 8, 2005, 00:21:16]