IBM Project puts Supercomputer on a Chip

By Therese Poletti

Mercury NewsIBM disclose today details of a project to put a supercomputer on a chip.

Code-named the "Cell'' chip, it has been in development by IBM, Sony and Toshiba since 2001 for Sony's next-generation video gaming console. But the chip also has been designed with a grander purpose -- to become a core chip for devices ranging from supercomputers to network servers.

"We have a supercomputer on a chip,'' said Jim Kahle, an IBM Fellow who heads up the design team of 400 engineers at IBM's facilities in Austin. "This will be significantly faster than previous types of game systems and should provide new effects.''

The Cell chip initially will be used in workstations to create movies, video games and other digital content. Sony and Toshiba plan to put the chip in their high definition television sets by 2006.

Sony has not revealed when it will launch the successor to its PlayStation 2 video game console. But the company has said it will demonstrate the Cell chip-powered console in May at E3, the gaming industry trade show. Analysts expect the console to debut sometime in 2006.

A gaming console with that kind of supercomputing power will give video games a true cinematic feel, especially when played on a high definition television screen, said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon.

"If the story and the action is good enough, you will forget you are playing a game, you will be part of a movie,'' Peddie said.

IBM and its partners have not released many details about the new chip. But a patent issued to Sony in September 2003 gave some clues about the design of the chip, which organizes groups of smaller processors to work together.

Kahle said IBM will not divulge any information about the chip's performance. But he did tout the speed of a prototype workstation, which is designed around the Cell chip. IBM said a Cell-based workstation will reach a supercomputer-like performance of 16 teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second. By contrast, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the NEC Earth Simulator, hit a peak speed of 36 teraflops this year.

"We are talking about some very intense compute systems that will be on par with some of the fastest in the world when we start rolling these out,'' Kahle said.

IBM also confirmed the Cell chip will have a number of processors on one chip. Although the company will not reveal the number of processors on each chip, analysts expect there will be at least four.

The design combines the core of IBM's PowerPC processor with another processor core that is capable of massive floating point processing.

"One processor is running the operating system and coordinating other events and the other does the heavy lifting and the computation,'' said Kahle. "We have made this fairly general purpose. This is very capable of processing many different kinds of workloads.''

With the Cell chip powering workstations, it could significantly speed development of games and movies. Sony and IBM are expected to team up together to sell the prototype workstation to content developers.

"We know a lot of people in gaming and special effects who are waiting for this,'' said Rick Doherty, principal analyst at Envisioneering in Seaford, N.Y.

Characters can have more intelligence because they may get their own dedicated processor. "Those characters can be more lifelike, with their own intelligence. It will change gaming and the way people think about their ideas,'' he said.

IBM, Sony and Toshiba will be presenting four technical papers on the Cell chip's design at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco Feb. 6 to 10.