bikkle wrote:Sony, IBM to offer Cell workstations for Xmas]
I WANT ONE!
Hell....I want ANYTHING but the always-late-to-production G5-G6 for my Mac.
Sony, IBM, Toshiba team on broadband supercomputing CPU
The Register / 12th March 2001 11:47 GMT
The [Cell] chip's codename also gives a clue to its functionality. Said Ken Kutaragi, head of Sony's Computer Entertainment division: "With built-in broadband connectivity, microprocessors that currently exist as individual islands will be more closely linked, making a network of systems act more as one, unified 'supersystem'. Just as biological cells in the body unite to form complete physical systems, Cell-based electronic products of all types will form the building blocks of larger systems."
That suggests that multi-processing support is being designed into Cell from day one, doing all sorts of clever stuff like reading any chip's data and instruction caches, NUMA-style - a feature already on Motorola's PowerPC roadmap. And IBM has a keen interest in NUMA, thanks to its purchase of Sequent.
Kutaragi's spiel also implies some degree of clustering too. Again, that's a technology IBM has been poking its nose into a lot of late, allowing it to flog huge Linux-based supercomputing clusters to big name corporate clients.
But before everyone starts getting too excited by all this, here's one other point to note: IBM has been here before. The Sony-IBM-Toshiba alliance is uncannily reminiscent of the Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance. One was formed to create an Intel-busting next-generation computing platform and the other launched the PowerPC.
SIT seems less overtly anti-Wintel than AIM was, the beating-up-on-Intel aspect isn't absent. Kutaragi has talked about beating Intel before.
Whatever, AIM was unable to unseat Intel, and ultimately the partners ended up squabbling and chasing different markets. It's too early to say the same thing will happen to SIT, but five years is a very long time in the computer industry. A lot can - and will - happen between now and Cell's mass production and implementation....
