Posted on 01/15/2006 9:16:39 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
WHILE THE PRESS brouhaha happily follows Apple about and co-conspirator Intel looks on, smugly hoping its tie-up with the much-loved computer maker will bring it some added kudos in its assault on the consumer electronics market, IBM, the giant ousted from the party, is getting on with business.
Big Blue may have been dumped by Apple but its compensation is plentiful. Its Power chips form the heart of upcoming console offerings from Sony and Nintendo as well as the XBox from Microsoft.
And let's face it, the press might like Apple and the kids might dig iTunes but sales of a million or so computers annually is pretty small beer in the grand scheme of things.
Paul Otellini may don a bunny suit to woo the Macistas but you can bet he'd don the apparel of a Geisha if Sony came a-courtin'.
And so it came to pass that, yesterday, IBM announced plans to extend its collaboration with Sony and Toshiba to produce a second generation Cell processor.
The trio has embarked on a second five-year stint of collaborative effort, after the first five-year deal culminated in the development of the Cell Processor which will power the upcoming Playstation 3.
This week the first Cell Technology “evaluation systems” were announced by US firm Mercury Computer Systems. IBM had already delivered Linux development tools for the Cell. www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell Now, as part of the fresh agreement with its Japanese partners, IBM will guide the Power-based Cell architecture towards a 32 nanometer process, "and beyond".
The press may flagellate itself into a frenzy over the Intel Mac alliance but the punters will vote with their wallets and buy more machines labelled Playstation 3 than Apple will sell in a lifetime.
This is the box that Intel and other US giants are really concerned about in the new playground they call the consumer electronics space. And the PS3 will sport no Viiv label, nor will it run Windows, of course.
So do you imagine that Intel and Apple and IBM and even Billy G haven’t sat round the table and tried to figure out a strategy to foil the Japanese? The Xbox won’t stop the PS3, no matter how much Microsoft subsidises the wee beastie. There will be no Intel chip nestling in a future Playstation. The only hope it seems was for Big Blue to step into the breach and deal with the Japanese threat.
And so the staid old giant became the console king. Its dominance in that area will have led it to toss Apple’s fairly measly business in Intel's direction. But it will have chipmaker and its allies hounding after it now, as the battlelines are drawn up for the scrap to decide whose name sits on the convergence box par excellence.
Unfortunately for the American alliances, the favourite contender for that accloade sports a four-letter logo that has ruled the consumer space for years.
Compared to Sony, Intel is a mere babe in arms. µ
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By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer.Thu Jan 12, 7:41 AM ET
The partnership among IBM Corp., Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news). and Toshiba Corp. that produced the vaunted Cell microprocessor is being extended for another five years to focus on advancing chip designs at extremely small scales.
The companies planned to announce Thursday that their next joint research project will aim toward chips with features smaller than 32 nanometers — 32 billionths of a meter.
Today's chips generally are built with components as small as 90 nanometers, though 65-nanometer-based chips are emerging. It's part of the microprocessing industry's constant fight to wring performance improvements and cost efficiencies out of ever smaller chips.
Other efforts in the 30-nanometer range are already occurring, including a partnership between IBM and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Research into molecular computing is aiming even smaller, toward chips with features that might operate in the space of 2 to 3 nanometers.)
Lisa Su, a vice president in IBM's semiconductor research and development center, said this partnership is different because of Sony's and Toshiba's expertise with the specific needs of chips for consumer devices.
The Cell chip already produced by the IBM-Sony-Toshiba pact packs eight processors. With its powerful graphics capabilities, Cell is the heart of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 video game system and next-generation Toshiba TVs, but it has yet to win much wider acceptance.
Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said the companies appear to have concluded that costs and complexities of 32-nanometer technology would be so immense that "partnering is the best way to go."
Mercury wants to sell embedded systems - anything else is just icing. As for performance, time will tell if it's really there, or if this is Emotion Engine part deux.
It's gonna show up in a lot of TV's....
Yeah. That, and the Mercury deal tell me it's going to be blazing hot for DSP-type applications. Whether it's suitable for general-purpose computing is a whole other question, though. My guess is that the performance will be a bit more down-to-earth.
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