Cell Microprocessor Debuts Today

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco today, IBM, Sony and Toshiba will announce details of their revolutionary new Cell microprocessor, which will power the PlayStation 3 and the next generation of HDTVs in 2006 -- and was designed right here in Austin.

The scalable, modular Cell design is an evolution of IBM's 64-bit G5 processor (currently used in Apple's Power Macs), but controls an array of eight additional 128-bit synergistic processing elements, or S.P.E.'s. A supercomputer on a chip the size of a thumbtack, it reportedly clocks in at 5.6 GHz, and has been optimized for broadband-rich multimedia applications and parallel processing.

(More details available via The New York Times and The Financial Times.)