Supercomputers Come Home

Future consumer electronics will be as powerful as today's supercomputers--thanks to next-generation processors, say three industry mainstays.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCEI), IBM, and Toshiba will begin development this month on a teraflop-class microprocessor, the companies announced on Monday. They hope the new microprocessor will make possible within the next five years consumer electronics devices more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer.

Announcing their plans in Tokyo, the three companies committed to investing more than $400 million into the scheme to produce a 1-teraflop-class consumer microprocessor over the next five years. An IBM facility in Austin, Texas, will serve as base for the ambitious research project, which aims to put as many as 300 engineers to work in getting the equivalent of a supercomputer on a single microchip.

To do this, the team will have to engineer the chip at sub-0.1-micron levels. In this type of chip manufacturing, the tracks and spaces in a chip can be made smaller than one-tenth of a micron. A micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter.

The smaller the tracks and spaces on a chip, the more components can be squeezed onto a chip and the faster the chip can be. Current cutting-edge microchips are produced at 0.11-micron or 0.13-micron, and commercial production at sub-0.1-micron levels has not been introduced yet.

Nevertheless, the partners are confident that they can achieve their goals. "If we were not confident, we wouldn't make the announcement," says Kenichi Sugiyama, a spokesperson for Toshiba.

Pursuant to this goal, SCEI said Monday it has agreed to license 0.1-micron silicon-on-insulator process technology from IBM for use in future broadband processors. The license will allow SCEI to build more advanced production lines in Japan for manufacturing microprocessors for its PlayStation series of games consoles and other future devices. Toshiba is already working on developing its own 0.1-micron process technology.

The new microprocessor has already been given a code name: Cell. The chip will be designed from the start to work on broadband networks and thus be able to function as part of a larger network of processors. The chip will function at supercomputer speeds, using broadband connections operating at far higher rates than are in common use today, says Bill O'Leary, director of communications for IBM's Microelectronics Division.

"Even though broadband is having some stumbling issues rolling out right now, we believe that four to five years from now, broadband is going to be ubiquitous," he says.

SCEI's President Ken Kutaragi explained in a statement why the Cell code name is appropriate: "Just as biological cells in the body unite to form complete physical structures, Cell-based products of all types will be more closely linked, making a network of systems act more as one, unified 'supersystem.'"

"In the future, all devices will be linked by a broadband network, so under the umbrella of broadband, a lot will be linked," says Sugiyama. "This processor is not just for the PlayStation but for all types of devices."

Besides being used in future gaming systems, the microprocessor is likely to be part of PDAs (personal digital assistants), Web phones, "and a lot of other things that haven't been envisioned yet," O'Leary says.

The deal extends a partnership between SCEI and Toshiba that began when SCEI was developing its PlayStation 2 games console. Toshiba developed the Emotion Engine, the processor at the heart of the PlayStation 2, and also supplies much of the Rambus DRAM used in the device.