Check out a future computer chip (possibly powering the Playstation 3)

[Gordon Moore]

Here's the full article:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-948493.html?tag=nl

The new multimedia processor, touted as a "supercomputer on a chip," is well on the way to completion, IBM says. The chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3 game console, and elements of its design are expected in future server chips from IBM.

Here's the cool part:

While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver one trillion calculations per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running at 2.5GHz.
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"A RONSTER!"

[JonMarsh]

"Cell" could eventually be a serious challenge by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM to the relative hegomony of Intel/Microsoft. I'll be watching this with considerable interest.

But then I always seem to be interested in off beat things- ran BeOS on one system for some time, and will probably get YellowTables Zeta, the licensed upgrade/development of desktop Be. There are things BeOS does with ludicrous ease and reliability that windows just can't touch- including much greater efficiency scaling with multple processors- and it's had a true journaled 64 bit file system for ages. My current notion of a dream system would be a two or four way Opteron running BeOS ported to X64, with applications available, of course. The unfortunate irony of Be is that there's probably never been such a great OS with so few appliations available... though wtih Opera and the GoBe office suite, I could do a fair amount of basic things. And the only other OS I've ever seen 8-10 video windows running simultaneously and smoothly on was a high end Mac runniing OSX- certainly not the same level of hardware that my 600 MHz Athlon had- which would do the same thing. But then, BeOS was designed for media from the ground up.

It'll be very interesting to see what comes out of this besides Playstation 3 and high power inexpensive IBM servers- but imagine this system with Linux ported to it- it would trash the Xenon market for workstations, wouldn't it?

~Jon




Earth First!
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We'll screw up the other planets later....