Sony, IBM, Toshiba To Offer First Peek Of 'Cell' Chip Design
By DON CLARK and ROBERT A. GUTH
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
An ambitious effort to shake up the computer and consumer-electronics industries is taking a step into the light.
At a technical conference Monday in San Francisco, researchers from Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. plan to release details about a new breed of computer chip, dubbed Cell, that is designed to supercharge digital media and computer graphics -- and to slow Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. from extending their hegemony into the living room.
The chip could help send multiple streams of digital video around a home, even tailoring the image resolution to fit each TV or other device receiving it. Cell is being targeted for use in Sony's next videogame machine -- expected as early as 2006 -- and digital TVs and DVD players. But the technology is also expected to be adapted for products ranging from high-performance computers to cellphones.
"We think that Cell is going to forever change consumer electronics," says Rick Doherty, an analyst at the Envisioneering Group, a market research firm in Seaford, N.Y.
Yet several past efforts to counter the dominant "Wintel" technology standard have stalled, as customers resist technologies that require them to rewrite new application programs from scratch. Intel's chip technology and Microsoft software have been adapted to take on new kinds of chores, propelled by an army of programmers and hardware developers. The two giants use that technology community to defend their computing business, and are developing new products to move into consumer electronics.
The Cell effort is "going to take a tremendous amount of work to develop not only the programming tools and the know-how around the architecture, but a significant base of applications," says Justin Rattner, director of Intel's corporate technology group.
Cell supporters have already discussed their plans in general terms, but are expected to lay out the chip's basic design for the first time at the International Solid State Circuits Conference today. If nothing else, their effort points to wrenching change in the world of semiconductors.
For most of the past two decades, Intel and its competitors were able to increase the operating speed of microprocessors, measured in gigahertz. That performance gain came as companies shrunk the size of transistors and other circuitry, which also lowers production costs and increases chips' data-storage capacity.
But those improvements are getting harder to achieve, and are causing chips to consume too much electrical power. In response, Intel and other companies hope to boost performance by putting the equivalent of two or more electronic brains on a chip, while working on power-saving tricks. At the event known as ISSCC, Intel will describe such a "dual-core" design for its Itanium chip line that has a whopping 1.72 billion transistors -- four times more than prior models -- but uses 23% less power.
Other companies aren't just using two general-purpose brains; they are using the extra transistors to build in circuitry for specialized tasks, like the number-crunching needed to create three-dimensional computer graphics. Texas Instruments Inc., for example, has created such "systems on a chip" to reduce the number of components needed for products such as cellphones.
Cell also relies on the idea of special-purpose processors. But there are new twists, technical papers being released at ISSCC show. Where Intel's popular chips evolved from the world of data processing, Cell's creators wanted to build devices that were designed from the ground up for communicating over broadband networks. That meant a new kind of software as well as a new chip.
A 2002 patent described the idea of software "cells" -- chunks of data that are bundled with programming code needed to process them. Instead of storing a program to repeatedly carry out a particular job on one chip, the software cells may be periodically sent to devices over a network. The tiny programs can be passed around to be handled by the appropriate processing unit -- on a single chip or in other devices -- which can collaborate to get computing work done.
The initial Cell chip has one processing unit that passes computing chores to eight other "synergistic" processors, an ISSCC paper shows. It can carry out 10 sequences of instructions simultaneously -- compared with two for most Intel chips, an ISSCC paper shows. Sony and IBM, which will manufacture the chip, have discussed selling a Cell-based workstation this year for videogame designers and animators; in November, IBM said a workstation with multiple Cell chips could perform 16 trillion mathematical operations a second, putting it in the ranks of the world's fastest supercomputers.
Cell may get its biggest initial test in Sony's next videogame console. The company plans to provide technical details of the machine at an event in Tokyo next month, and show a working prototype in May.
That machine's likely opponent is Xenon, the code name for a new Microsoft game machine expected later this year. Xenon will run on another chip Microsoft is building jointly with IBM and ATI Technologies Inc. That chip may not match Cell's power, but it could be considerably easier to program.
Game makers lacked good programming tools when the PlayStation 2 hit the market in 2000. Industry executives say the next videogame battle may come down to whether Sony and its partners can create tools that exploit Cell's power.
Hans Stork, Texas Instruments' chief technology officer, said such tools should let programmers create software without having to understand how computing chores are divvied out to many processing units. "If not, it's going to require significant investments to enable use of the architecture," he says.
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