Forbs 'Super Cell' article

[NEXT BOX]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... 0d6df251c4

Super Cell

Thu Jan 27, 6:34 PM ET

By Benjamin Fulford David Whelan

One of the most gossiped-about and eagerly awaited technologies of 2005 is a
powerful microprocessor called Cell. Produced by a consortium of Sony,
Toshiba and IBM, Cell will be the brains of the next-generation Sony
PlayStation 3, due out in 2006. If its builders' advance hype is right, Cell
promises a new era of graphics-rich computers, as well as TVsets and home
theaters capable of processing and moving large volumes of high-definition
content. "Cell will make possible a transformation in entertainment like
that from novels to movies,"says Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer
Entertainment. Technical details will be released Feb. 6 at a conference in
San Francisco.



We've managed to glean some inside tidbits. A single Cell chip is expected
to be capable of surpassing 250 billion floating point operations, or 250
gigaflops, per second, rivaling the best mid-1990s supercomputer. In flops,
it is six times as fast as Nvidia's new graphics chip.

"It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell
engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is
in its flexibility."Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people
into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.
Each Cell chip will have between eight and ten separate processing cores on
one piece of silicon (a final decision is pending), compared to two for the
latest Pentium chips.


Intel is watching Cell warily, but Intel spokesman Howard High says that
while the chip may be successful in videogame consoles, he doubts it would
reverberate beyond into the realm of PC computers. "The Japanese tend to
shoot high in terms of their goals. So far they haven't had a successful
general-purpose microprocessor," says High.


The Cell chip will go into production by midyear at IBM's East Fishkill,
N.Y. wafer factory. Sony and IBM have announced plans for a workstation
combining multiple Cells that, acting in concert, will reach 16 trillion
flops, ranking alongside the world's top ten supercomputers. It will be
aimed at engineers and Hollywood animators. This figure is "probably a p.r.
exaggeration," the Cell engineer says, but future workstations containing
racks of 32 chips will be able to attain this speed. Toshiba has plans for a
Cell-based hi-def TVset in 2006.


Cell's big public debut will likely wow conference attendees with very fast
graphics and multimedia applications on a prototype computer. "You couldn't
imagine how fast it will be," says the inside engineer. "It will be able to
make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff
needed to produce such quality,"he says.


One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor
going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to
production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors are
squeezed even closer together than the 90-nanometer production process that
Intel uses and that the Cell consortium has claimed to have been using so
far. The denser a chip's transistors, the more powerful the chip can be.
"For Intel, it would be a big shock," promises the engineer.

[NEXT BOX]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u ... 0d6df251c4

Super Cell

Thu Jan 27, 6:34 PM ET


By Benjamin Fulford David Whelan

One of the most gossiped-about and eagerly awaited technologies of 2005 is a
powerful microprocessor called Cell. Produced by a consortium of Sony,
Toshiba and IBM, Cell will be the brains of the next-generation Sony
PlayStation 3, due out in 2006. If its builders' advance hype is right, Cell
promises a new era of graphics-rich computers, as well as TVsets and home
theaters capable of processing and moving large volumes of high-definition
content. "Cell will make possible a transformation in entertainment like
that from novels to movies,"says Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer
Entertainment. Technical details will be released Feb. 6 at a conference in
San Francisco.



We've managed to glean some inside tidbits. A single Cell chip is expected
to be capable of surpassing 250 billion floating point operations, or 250
gigaflops, per second, rivaling the best mid-1990s supercomputer. In flops,
it is six times as fast as Nvidia's new graphics chip.

"It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell
engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is
in its flexibility."Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people
into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.

Each Cell chip will have between eight and ten separate processing cores on
one piece of silicon (a final decision is pending), compared to two for the
latest Pentium chips.

Intel is watching Cell warily, but Intel spokesman Howard High says that
while the chip may be successful in videogame consoles, he doubts it would
reverberate beyond into the realm of PC computers. "The Japanese tend to
shoot high in terms of their goals. So far they haven't had a successful
general-purpose microprocessor," says High.

The Cell chip will go into production by midyear at IBM's East Fishkill,
N.Y. wafer factory. Sony and IBM have announced plans for a workstation
combining multiple Cells that, acting in concert, will reach 16 trillion
flops, ranking alongside the world's top ten supercomputers. It will be
aimed at engineers and Hollywood animators. This figure is "probably a p.r.
exaggeration," the Cell engineer says, but future workstations containing
racks of 32 chips will be able to attain this speed. Toshiba has plans for a
Cell-based hi-def TVset in 2006.

Cell's big public debut will likely wow conference attendees with very fast
graphics and multimedia applications on a prototype computer. "You couldn't
imagine how fast it will be," says the inside engineer. "It will be able to
make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff
needed to produce such quality,"he says.

One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor
going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to
production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors are
squeezed even closer together than the 90-nanometer production process that
Intel uses and that the Cell consortium has claimed to have been using so
far. The denser a chip's transistors, the more powerful the chip can be.
"For Intel, it would be a big shock," promises the engineer.

[Bill Cable]

Sweet. I wonder what one of those 32-chip Cell computers will run. I doubt
it'll be anywhere near the cost of the other supercomputers on the top-10
list.

--
Bill Cable
Steeler Fan and Star Wars Collector
http://CreatureCantina.com <----- funny
Cable is incapable of contributing anything positive to this world - cstoj

[Jan Lucas]

NEXT BOX schrieb:

One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor
going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to
production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors are

Yeah, right they got 65nm working and just waiting for the PS3 to start
using it? Or they are just predicting they will get 65nm working in time
for PS3 and will be able to reach the clockspeeds and yields they need?
Just remember how companies strugled to get 130 and 90nm working and
they will just get 65nm working with Sonys magical help or what? Just
look it up, it wasn't just Intel and AMD who struggled getting it work,
but other companies like IBM too. (BTW especially that East Fishkill FAB
that is supposed to manufacture the cell) IBM also thought they could do
3 Ghz G5 with a year of G5 introduction, and now it is more than a year
and everything we have is a water cooled (one could also say:
professionally overclocked) 2.5 GHZ G5.

Jan

[Peter]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 18:09:14 -0600, "NEXT BOX" <nextbox@xbox2.net>
wrote:

"It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell
engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is
in its flexibility."Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people
into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.

And eat your heart out Forbes magazine. It will very probably run
Linux, as this can be easily and cheaply adamted to run on such new
hardware.

Forbes in 2003 called Linux people a bunch of 'crunchies' when
commenting how SCO would get its way with imposing extor.... er
licencing on Linux.

[NEXT BOX]

"Jan Lucas" <jan@lucas-berlin.de> wrote in message
news:ctuifp$74j$05$1@news.t-online.com...

NEXT BOX schrieb:

One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor
going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to
production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors
are

Yeah, right they got 65nm working and just waiting for the PS3 to start
using it? Or they are just predicting they will get 65nm working in time
for PS3 and will be able to reach the clockspeeds and yields they need?
Just remember how companies strugled to get 130 and 90nm working and
they will just get 65nm working with Sonys magical help or what? Just
look it up, it wasn't just Intel and AMD who struggled getting it work,
but other companies like IBM too. (BTW especially that East Fishkill FAB
that is supposed to manufacture the cell) IBM also thought they could do
3 Ghz G5 with a year of G5 introduction, and now it is more than a year
and everything we have is a water cooled (one could also say:
professionally overclocked) 2.5 GHZ G5.

Jan

the clockspeed for Xbox Next CPU is rumored / reportedly 3.5 or 3.5+ GHz.
but the Processors based on Cell are *officially* going to be clocked at 4.6
GHz. I'll wait til it actually happens. not holding my breath. I predict
3+ GHz Cell but not 4 GHz.

[USAF LM]

NEXT BOX wrote:

"It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell
engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is
in its flexibility."Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people
into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.

Wow, amazing.

The Cell chip will go into production by midyear at IBM's East Fishkill,
N.Y. wafer factory. Sony and IBM have announced plans for a workstation
combining multiple Cells that, acting in concert, will reach 16 trillion
flops, ranking alongside the world's top ten supercomputers. It will be
aimed at engineers and Hollywood animators. This figure is "probably a p.r.
exaggeration," the Cell engineer says, but future workstations containing
racks of 32 chips will be able to attain this speed. Toshiba has plans for a
Cell-based hi-def TVset in 2006.

Really? Cell is an uber chip that in the future will reach 16 trillion
flops, but right now the best use we can come up with is the PS3 and a
TV. Oh, wait, it's an "hi-def" TV. That's different. I can't wait to
replace the room full of Opteron servers I'm using now to power my
Samsung HDTV. Thank God [Sony] for Cell.

Cell's big public debut will likely wow conference attendees with very fast
graphics and multimedia applications on a prototype computer. "You couldn't
imagine how fast it will be," says the inside engineer. "It will be able to
make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff
needed to produce such quality,"he says.

Like programming? Man, Cell is so awesome it makes games itself.

One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor
going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to
production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors are
squeezed even closer together than the 90-nanometer production process that
Intel uses and that the Cell consortium has claimed to have been using so
far. The denser a chip's transistors, the more powerful the chip can be.

So let me get this straight. This guy says that Cell will be powerful
enough to run 16 trillion flops, real time rendering of animated movies
and will make our lives like the Matrix, but he doesn't even know if it
will be 65 nm? This thing will do everything. They just don't know how
to make it yet.

"For Intel, it would be a big shock," promises the engineer.

I bet it would be for Sony as well. Maybe they should wait till this
idea is even plausible. What an article. I can't believe anybody buys
this garbage.

Of course, this guy says Cell will be awesome.
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html

He also knows how to build a gravitational engine.
http://www.blachford.info/quantum/gravity.html

And travel faster than light.
http://www.blachford.info/quantum/fastlight.html

He also knows about "true" physics. Nevermind the lack of mathematical
proofs. Math has nothing to do with physics apparently.
http://www.blachford.info/quantum/dimeng.html

Sony needs to hire this guy. Not as an engineer, no, because he's
obviously not qualified for that. He'd be perfect for the marketing
department.

[Liam Slider]

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 01:46:47 +0000, Peter wrote:

And eat your heart out Forbes magazine. It will very probably run
Linux, as this can be easily and cheaply adamted to run on such new
hardware.

Yes it will. Sony's PS3 will have Linux as it's OS, they've been saying so
for quite a while. And the PS3 is planned to run on these processors.