Looking Over the Next Hill! by Gary Woods

All of us in Geek Land have been looking forward to the dual-core processors as the next surge forward. But there's another chip that I came a cross the other day which seems to even surpass those as yet unreleased CPUs. The chip is called The Cell and is a joint effort of IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It's a thumbnail-size multi-core chip featuring a whopping nine individual processors (one 64-bit IBM PowerPC processor and eight so-called synergistic processing units.)

They've been working on The Cell for about four years and it is specifically designed to crunch numbers for high-bandwidth multi-media applications. It can perform 10 times faster than the latest PC processors and boasts clock speeds greater than 4GHz.

The first place The Cell will appear will be in the Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, due out at the end of '05 or early '06. It will also appear in high-definition televisions from Toshiba, expected in 2006.

The Cell's modular, network ready design and its high-speed bandwidth mean it will really shine when it comes to applications that share "communal media" such as wireless handheld gaming devices and smart phones.

The chip is able to run multiple operating systems at the same time, which could make it attractive to notebook makers wishing to sell a low-cost Linux portable computer to which consumers could later add Windows at their own expense.

The Cell, coming soon to a device near you!

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