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Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your DesktopIf you were impressed with dual core technology and quad core processors seem a bit like overkill, how about Terascale processing with 80 cores? Sound far fetched? Intel doesn’t think so. Head on over to PCPerspective for the rest of the article. For our discussions here, the term “terascale” will refer to a processor with 32 or more cores. Moving away from the “large” cores seen in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 lines from Intel and AMD, the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we...

This news came out a week ago (edit: IBM’s press release came out this afternoon) but I didn’t have anything to add so I didn’t post it. I decided this morning that it was interesting and ought to get a mention just for the news.****************************Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November...

Toshiba and Sony expect dramatic gains in electronics for entertainment. SAN FRANCISCO – IBM Corp. on Monday formally unveiled what it describes as a "supercomputer on a chip" that promises to dramatically increase the computing power in video-game systems, televisions and other consumer electronics.At an engineering conference here, semiconductor designers from IBM and partners Sony Group and Toshiba Corp. said their new "Cell" processor has 10 times more computing power than traditional chips in handling some applications.*********************************************** Cell is said to run at clock speeds greater than 4 gigahertz, which would top the 3.8 GHz of Intel's current top-speed chip....

IBM, in cooperation with fellow industry giants Sony and Toshiba, recently announced a new processor, called the Cell. While this in itself is not really cause for much celebration (except perhaps for the odd bedfellows involved in the project) the new multi-core chip might well prove to be something special. For one thing, it's going to be at the heart of Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console, which we have a feeling may be slightly popular…The Cell processor is vastly different from conventional processors inside. This tiny chip contains a powerful 64-bit Dual-threaded IBM PowerPC core but also eight proprietary 'Synergistic...

SAN FRANCISCO -- Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power everything from video-game consoles to business computers. Devices built with the processor, code-named Cell, will compete directly with the PC chips that have powered most of the world's personal computers for a quarter century. Cell's designers say their chip, built from the start with the burgeoning world of rich media and broadband networks in mind, can deliver 10 times the performance over today's PC processors....