Sony Exec says the Cell is just as powerful as the Pentium
The top chip maker Intel has stood its ground for decades as the industry leader, and recently Intel’s flag ship Pentium has been officially challenged by Sony’s newest computer chip called the Cell.
Recently, Businessweek reports that On Dec. 14, Kenshi Manabe, its semiconductor chief, told a gathering of financial analysts that he expects the next-generation Cell processor to become the industry standard for all kinds of multimedia consumer electronics. “The Cell chip is as good as the Pentium, if not better,” Manabe said, according to several people who attended the meeting.
Sony will introduce the Cell powered PS3 in the spring of 2006 but have not made any official announcement whether the chip will be used for other than PS3. Furthermore, some analysts stated that the Cell technology has huge potential in multimedia devices but Kenshi Manabe made no specific references as to if the chip will be used on anything else. The Cell powered PS3 could help improve Sony’s forecasts of 80 million net loss this year.
The main reason why the Cell technology has the potential of branching out into multimedia devices is having the ability to run many applications such as e-mails, internet surfing, and word processing at once instead of traditional one at a time approach by today’s computer chips. This technology is called Multicore Processing and instead of processing applications one at a time, it allows multiple processing of applications by several chips within the Multicore Chip. The Cell can be configured between 4 chips all the way up to 16 depending on the environment and the workload.
When Sony was marketing PS2 back in the late 1990s, they have boasted the awesome potential of the chip that powered the console. However, after PS2 had launched in October of 1999, the promising chip was never applied in any other multimedia devices. It is very possible that the Cell could be utilized to simulate Pentium’s capabilities or it could just remain inside the PS3. Only time will tell folks.
Filed under: Main
Leave a Reply