February 07, 2005

Playstation 3 CPU Cell Details

Engineers from Sony, IBM, and Toshiba gave more details on the cell processor today at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The Cell is a 64 bit POWER processor with an additional 8 "synergistic processing" units. It will launch at over 4 ghz (analyst estimate 4.6 ghz at this time) and have 2.5 megabytes of onboard XDR Rambus memory. The chip will be manufactured with 234 million transistors through a 90 nanometer process.

Having 9 processor cores and speeds of over 4 ghz is very impressive. If the can deliver on these specifications, the Playstation 3 will blow away Xbox 2 and Nintendo Revolution in computing and graphics horsepower. The problem with being so ambitious is the prospects of long delays like Gran Turismo 4. Sony has grand plans for this chip to for home media servers, graphics workstations, and consumer electronics.