Category: Kev’s Blog

Sony and Nvidia have announced that they have been working together for the past 2 years on developing the graphics processor for the upcoming Playstation3, due to be released next year.

This may also be the reason the Microsoft announced some time ago (last year?) that they were dropping Nvidia in favour for ATI to supply the graphics processor for the new XBox2.

The role of the graphics processor in the PS3 is unclear at this point, as it is already known that the Sony/IBM/Toshiba designed and produced Cell processor which is going to be at the heart of the PS3 is going to incorporate advanced processor capabilities for processing vector graphics and graphics processing.

IBM has annouced that they are selling their PC business to a Chinese company, Lenovo.

IBM have stated that the PC business has become more like selling appliances, and does not fit with their strategy for technology innovation

OnJava.com have an interview with the developers of JDisto, an app that allows multiple Java apps to run together in the same JVM instance.

The main benefit of this is to avoid the overhead of each app running in its own memory hungry JVM. However, with the tendency of large Java desktop apps to hang and crash after a period of time (IBMs WSAD and DB2 client tools come to mind), I wonder how stable this environment is in practice? Can they isolate one app from another so one hanging app doesn’t effect another?

Sony and Toshiba announced this week that products based on the new Cell CPU will be released next year, 2005

First product available will be a graphics workstation. High definition TVs will be released in 2006.

Sony and Toshiba will be presenting further technical info on the new CPU at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco in February 2005.

Sony have also confirmed that the next generation Playstation built around the Cell will be demo’d at E3 in May next year, although no official release date for the PS3 has yet been stated.