IBM announced today that the company has begun producing a new, 65nm version of the Cell Broadband Engine at IBM's East Fishkill, New York microchip production facility.

The Cell chip, jointly developed by IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba, is effectively a supercomputer-on-a-chip, providing breakthrough performance for consumer electronics, medical imaging, design engineering and other graphics-intensive applications. In addition to serving as the digital heartbeat of Sony Computer Entertainment's PLAYSTATION 3, the chip also appears in IBM's BladeCenter servers.

Using 65-nm node technology, IBM can make the Cell's surface area about 40% smaller compared to the 90-nm node. The chip size reduction enables cost reduction for products such as Sony's PS3.

A team of computer scientists from IBM, Sony Group and Toshiba has collaborated on the development of the Cell microprocessor at a joint design center established in Austin, Texas, since March 2001.