Companies Unveil Powerful Microprocessor

Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power video game consoles and 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 of today’s PC processors.

It also will not carry the same technical baggage that has made most of today’s computers compatible with older PCs. That architectural divergence will challenge the current dominant paradigm of computing that Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. have fostered.

The new chip is expected to be used in Sony’s next-generation PlayStation game console in 2006. Toshiba plans to incorporate it into high-end televisions. And IBM has said it will sell a workstation with the chip starting this year.

Companies are remaining coy about where it might be used and whether it will be compatible with older technology.

Supercomputer claims are nothing new in the high-tech industry, and over the years chip and computer firms have steadily improved microprocessor performance even without altering chips’ underlying architecture.

And although its competitors may well match the Cell chip in performance by the time it debuts, it differs considerably from today’s processors in constitution.

Cell is composed of several computing engines, or cores. A core based on IBM’s Power architecture controls eight “synergistic” processing centers. In all, they can simultaneously carry out 10 instruction sequences, compared with two for today’s Intel chips.

The new microprocessor also is expected to be able to run multiple operating systems and programs at the same time while ensuring each has enough resources. In the home, that could allow for a device that’s capable of handling a video game, television and general-purpose computer at once.

This year, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plan to release their own “multicore” chips, which also increase the number of instructions that can be executed at once. IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. already sell chips with multiple cores, mainly for business servers.

On Monday, Intel announced that it had completed the first product runs of its dual-core processors and said it planned to deliver two separate dual-core Pentium chips and chipsets in the second quarter.

Cell appears to have an advantage in the number of transistors -- 234 million compared with 125 million for today’s latest Pentium 4 chips. Traditional chip makers, however, have regularly doubled their number of transistors every 12 to 18 months.

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.