Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba are set to discuss firther details of the upcoming ‘Cell’ processor chip today at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco today.
Sony, IBM and Toshiba have jointly developed this new processor to be a general purpose processor for consumer devices, like game consoles, TVs, and cell phones.
The first device due to be released is Sony’s Playstation 3, which is due to be demo’d at this years E3 entertainment conference. The official launch is expected to be early next year (2006).
The Cell processor is gaining a lot of attention, as it will be the first consumer processor chip to contain multiple independent processor cores, each capable of processing a separate tasks. The processors will also be capable of distributing tasks amongst multiple processors, offering ‘grid’ type distributed processing capabilities.
Being branded as a ‘supercomputer on a chip’ in the IT press, the chip is expected to have the processing power 100 times that of a current Intel Pentium 2.4Ghz CPU.