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Monday, March 12, 2001
IBM, Toshiba, Sony Plan Supercomputer-On-Chip
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IBM Corp., Toshiba Corp., and Sony Corp.'s computer entertainment unit
Monday announced plans to spend more than $400 million in the next five
years to develop a "supercomputer-on-a-chip" architecture for extremely
fast broadband network processors in consumer electronics applications.
The companies said they will set up the new development center on IBM's
campus in Austin to create ICs, based on copper metal interconnects,
silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors, and low-k dielectric
insulation. The highly integrated ICs--code-named "Cell"--will used
0.10-micron design rules, the companies said in an announcement made in
Tokyo early Monday.
The new Austin R&D center will employ nearly 300 computer architects,
chip designers, and other technical specialists. The result of their
work will be consumer-system ICs that are more powerful than IBM's Deep
Blue supercomputer, according to the partners. The new architecture
will be focused on low power consumption and "ultra high-speed"
broadband access on the Internet with the ability to deliver teraflops
(trillion floating-point operations per second), according to the
companies.
"The processor platform that people have only been able to imagine is
now going to become a reality," said Ken Kutaragi, president and chief
executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
He said the new architecture will break bottlenecks in network
processors. "With built-in broadband connectivity, microprocessors that
currently exist as individual islands will be more closely linked,
making a network of systems act more as one, unified 'supersystem,' "
Kutargi said. "Just as biological cells in the body unite to form
complete physical systems, Cell-based electronic products of all types
will form the building blocks of larger systems..." |
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