IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Speedy `Cell' Chip That Outruns Intel
Sony has released some of the details of their new Cell processor which will be put in use for the first time at the end of the year. The chip will operate at 4GHz.
Source: AnandtechThe Cell chip will go into production later this year. It has a clock speed of 4 gigahertz, or 4 billion cycles per second, the three companies said in a press conference at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco today. Computer- chip makers use the number of cycles their chips are capable of, or clock speed, as a proxy for performance.
And if that still isn't enough data for you, ElectronicsWeekly.com has even more technical details available on the new chip. The Cell processor will be built on a 90 nanometer processor and feature 8 64-bit floating point processors:
A first prototype of the device expected to power the Playstation 3 has a 221mm² die, uses 234 million transistors and is made using 90nm process technology.
The version of Cell announced today contains eight 64-bit floating point processors, referred to as synergistic processor elements (SPEs). Along side these is a 64-bit Power processor capable of running two threads.
SPEs take 128-bit operands, split into four 32-bit words. Up to 128 operands can be stored in the register file.
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