Category: Kev’s Blog

As expected, Sony/IBM/Toshiba presented details of their upcoming ‘supercomputer on a chip’, the ‘Cell’, yesterday at a hardware conference in San Francisco.

The details are still somewhat sparse, but there has been plenty of websites discussing the details since the announcement yesterday. Summarizing from various articles, the details are:

• multiple cores on each individual CPU (one main core and 8 other independent cores)
• operating speed ‘in excess’ of 4Ghz, although probably around 4.7Ghz
• ability to process multiple processes across it’s cores, cores on other CPUs, either locally or remotely
• data throughput bus speed around 100Gb/sec, using new Rambus technology
• Single processor performance equivalent to 32 RS/6000 machines
• Single processor performance 100 times that of current Intel Pention 4 2.4Ghz CPU

Google’s GMail service may be getting closer to an official launch, as within the last week or so there has been a number of exising users discussing on message boards and forums that they have been given a block of 50 invites for new users.

Google’s web-based email service has been sought after by some as an alternative online file storage service. So far they have been the web-based email service to offer the largest amount of storage, well in excess of other web-based email systems, of 1 Gb.

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.

IBM have released trial downloads for their Rational Application Developer v6.0 IDE product, based on Eclipse 3.0.

In case you were wondering where were versions 1.0 through 5.0, this is the re-badged Websphere Application Studio Developer (WSAD) product. It’s pretty full featured, new and improved, but unfortunately is not low fat – it comes packed with functionality and wizards for everything conceivable, including the kitchen sink.