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Article: New rival arrives for the Pentium. The Cell processor developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony may not quite justify the tag 'supercomputer on a chip', but it could have Intel watching its back. Clive Akass reports.
- Article from:
- Personal Computer World
- Article date:
- May 1, 2005
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The latest in a long line of processors attempting to overthrow the dominance of the classic PC x86 Intel chip architecture has been unveiled by its joint developers, IBM, Sony and Toshiba.
The Cell processor which will power Sony's Playstation 3 console when it launches next year, has a novel architecture (see below) and has been described as a supercomputer on a chip. Toshiba will use it in a smart television and IBM plans to build a workstation round it.
The designers say it has 10 times the performance of today's Pentium 4, which might make it as powerful as a supercomputer of a decade ago but can hardly compare with modern versions that use scores ...