IBM, Sony and Toshiba Debut Cell, a Processor With Supercomputer Ambitions

IBM, Sony, and Toshiba jointly presented a new processor called Cell at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on 7 February 2005. The three companies described it as a supercomputer compressed onto a single chip.

Cell draws on IBM's Power processor architecture and packs multiple processing cores onto one piece of silicon, allowing it to behave like several chips running in parallel. That design is what earns it the supercomputer comparison.

Sony plans to use Cell as the engine of the PlayStation 3 game console, giving most consumers their first encounter with the technology. Beyond gaming, the chip is also targeted at high-end televisions, home entertainment systems, and professional supercomputer installations.

Some industry analysts view Cell as a challenge to Intel's hold on the desktop processor market. Intel, for its part, was also scheduled to appear at the conference, presenting a dual-core Itanium chip carrying more than 1.7 billion transistors, designed to push overall processing performance higher.

Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in February 2005, in its own words.