Comments on: PlayStation 3 chip has split personality

Cell processor will have nine cores and run faster than 4GHz, engineers reveal.
Photo: See Cell run

[Christopher Hall]

Is each Cell designed...

Is each one designed to replace the front-side bus in the what now would be older CPUs? Or does each Cell have its own FSB that needs to be tweaked?

My Thoughts

"Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), falling a wee bit short of marketing hyperbole calling it a "supercomputer on a chip." The slowest machine on the current list of the Top 500 supercomputers can do 851 gigaflops."

Considering that most (if not all) of the 500 top computers use multiple chips, using 4 Cell Processors would pretty much make a system fall into the top 500, not bad at all if you ask me.

"The chip will have 234 million transistors, measure 221mm square and be produced using advanced 90-nanometer chipmaking processes. "

I hope its not 221mm Square...put two hard drives side by side...that surface area is approx 221mm square...thats pretty huge for a chip, I hope that's a typo.

"Some competitors, however, are skeptical that Cell will find much of a home outside of video games."

I'd love for this chip to gain widespread use...but I'm skeptical as well. We'll see!


This chip seems pretty impressive though, I can't wait to see it perform! Just hearing that Grid Computing is more or less native to this chip, you can almost imagine a version of the PlayStation where idle units will using processing power to help boost performance of other distant PlayStations.

I just checked the picture...

...and 221mm square is definitely a typo! lol

wanted 9layers of cooling 8 cpu BLOCK LOGIC withcoolpumpingandwiring

-------------------------------
=.left....5cooling............=
=left4wires......cpu..........=
=.........4cooling......right.=
=...............4cpuwiresright=
_______________________________