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Swift, Small, "Cell" Broadband Chip; Applications In Higher
Education |
By:
David Geer |
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Lead: An "advanced chip architecture for a new wave of devices
in the emerging broadband era" is coming from Sony, Toshiba and
IBM (according to a Toshiba news release).
How Fast?
How fast will the STI (Sony, Toshiba, and IBM) Cell chip cruise?
Figures are flying, from 100 times to thousands of times the
speed of a Pentium 4 processor (a 2.5GHz Pentium 4 is what is
specifically referred to in order to arrive at these numbers).
An IBM news release touts that the consumer electronics that
will carry these wafer-like, "system-on-a-chip" processors will
be faster than its own Deep Blue supercomputer is today.
Big Picture, Little Cell
The new chip will use "the world's most advanced research
technologies and chip-making techniques, including copper wires,
silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors and low-K dielectric
insulation, with features smaller than 0.10 microns -- 1,000
times thinner than a human hair. The result will be consumer
devices that operate at low power and access the broadband
Internet at ultra high speeds," (says a release from the STI
partnership).
Sony's Atsuo Omagari (Atsuo.Omagari@am.sony.com/ of Sony
Electronics Corporate Communications provided some background on
behalf of Sony HQ CCOM, Tokyo concerning the Cell chips.
Initially, Cell is slated to support the high performance needs
of future consumer electronics products. The coming consumer
electronics and network products that will use broadband -
products like games, movies, music, digital broadcasting, and
even PCs - will be enabled by Cell. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM will
benefit by developing each their own products that will rely on
the Cell processors and technology.
The STI triumvirate recently poured $2 Billion into the Cell
project in the form of upgrades to wafer chip plants in Japan
(this is in addition to the companies' initial commitment of
$400 million over five years starting back in 2001, according to
a Toshiba press release). Specifically, in April of last year
Sony announced that they would invest "200 billion yen over
three fiscal years from 2003 to 2005 in the installation of a
semiconductor fabrication line to build chips with 65 nanometer
processors on 300-mm wafers. With this investment, SCEI will
manufacture the new microprocessor for the broadband era,
code-named "Cell"," (according to a Sony press release). The
result of this effort will be an unprecedented, small, powerful
and stackable processor.
Cell will be offered at an affordable, static price, which it
must be in order to be included in PlayStation 3, one of the
first products in which it is expected to appear. Cell will
integrate communication, power and teraflop processing. It will
be capable of collecting huge stores of information, and
processing and communicating that information. It makes computer
systems on a chip scalable at the chip-level, simply by adding
more Cells one to another.
"The processor platform that people have only been able to
imagine is now going to become a reality," said Ken Kutaragi,
president and CEO of SCEI. "The new broadband processor,
code-named Cell, that we are going to create, will raise the
curtain on a new era in high-speed, network-based computing.
With built-in broadband connectivity, microprocessors that
currently exist as individual islands will be more closely
linked, making a network of systems act more as one, unified
'supersystem.' Just as biological cells in the body unite to
form complete physical systems, Cell-based electronic products
of all types will form the building blocks of larger systems."
How Cell Technology Will Catapult Higher Education
Intelligence Everywhere
Innumerable technologies, devices and applications can be
astonishingly enhanced, from cell phones to security. New
technologies such as intelligent buildings can be introduced.
The Cell chip will enable intelligence throughout the campus,
inside and out. Everything built as separately functioning
devices and applications - from access points to broadband
connections to projectors, smart phones and laptops will share
intelligence. Monitoring for security and recording monitored
activities are also applications that will acquire intelligence.
According to published timelines, which the Sony, Toshiba, IBM
partnership is exceeding, the technology to accomplish all this
will be available in at least two years, if not sooner. (There
were reports again as recently as year end 2003 that development
of the chip was progressing ahead of schedule.)
"Our work with SCEI and Toshiba on the Cell broadband processor
has progressed extremely well," said Dr. John Kelly, senior vice
president and group executive for the IBM Technology Group. "We
believe the Cell design, and the advanced technologies like SOI
with which it will be manufactured, will help change the way
people work, play and communicate. This announcement by
SCEI/Sony is a confirmation of the progress we've made with the
Cell design itself, of our advances in semiconductor technology
to help it reach its full potential and of Cell's far-reaching
implications for a wide variety of applications."
Devices
Devices, many of which will also be in use for home
entertainment, will be applicable for university collaboration,
communication and access to learning materials. These include
high graphics units similar to PlayStation, TV and HDTV sets,
and Internet access devices that merge technologies. Cell
technology will make it possible to integrate several
IP-addressable devices into one.
How Soon?
If mass production can push these chips into the market as
quickly and as cheaply as Sony did with PlayStation 2,
universities will have them and be exploring them very shortly.
Cell Sells Grid
When Cell chips proliferate and are joined through the Internet,
wired or wireless, there comes an economic incentive to move
more quickly toward a global computer grid. The grid will be
complete with grid databases and other valuable and incumbent
grid technologies (sensors, mass massaging of the world's data
collected by these sensors, and the list goes on).
Suddenly the grid insinuates itself into our lives beyond our
wildest dreams. It isn't just working across traditional
computers but cell phones can share processing power and
information as well as can any other device or appliance.
The Utility
Some Universities lease computers for a few weeks out of the
year, for the heavy load that comes at certain times (processing
registrations, grades, and graduation). They outsource this work
to computers at data centers and then often have to find a use
for all that extra processing power they've bought into for the
rest of the year.
More on Cell, the Global Grid and U.
This much processing power, this ubiquitous, this small brings
all devices in range of the worldwide computer grid. For people
who never thought of grid computing as invading the world of
consumer electronics and that of university constituents'
personal devices, remember that this technology, this Cell chip,
will likely appear first on the PlayStation 3. So why not at the
university as well?
Imagine all the university TVs, refrigerators, even university
owned fleets of trucks and cars (however small in number) all
doing grid computing together? Saving on power, reporting
information on what needs upgraded, repaired, purchased or
replaced from gas to parts to food stuffs, these are just a few
of the savings, precisions and conveniences of using Cell to
bring grid computing to every machine on campus.
Devices that run on batteries can be enabled with the Cell, and
the grid can be introduced to them. These include
communications, security and health applications devices.
Conclusion
Institutions that experiment with and apply Cell technology will
certainly discover its true benefits in this setting. As has
been seen with other developments like wireless, if these
applications prove themselves out, it won't take long for this
little wafer to spread virally across the nation's campuses.
Sidebar
ACUTA Member Presents Alternative
Rather than creating new devices around the Cell chip, ACUTA
member, Derek Abrams, information systems technologist, Oregon
State, envisions a chip that is an add-on. Dubbing his idea the
openCHIP™ Technology Platform, Abrams envisions "a kit that can
be used to enable any device".
The openCHIP™ platform would include an openKIT™ hardware kit,
distributed with an openAPI™. An openIDE™ or openSCRIPT™
development platform could also be used with the API to adapt
the chip to literally any device.
Derek's Concept "Both DALLAS Semiconductor and SONY have
products that head down this path as do other
"systems-on-a-chip" manufacturers. What is envisioned here is a
complete package that would allow anyone to attach intelligent
computing to any device in order to "enable" the device to be
controlled or managed," says Derek Abrams, information systems
technologist at Oregon State (derek.abrams@oregonstate.edu).
According to Abrams, what he calls "PLUGS", hardware and
software adapters, would be required on the devices in order to
use the chips. "If OEM's are not interested in incorporating
these PLUGS into their products maybe an after-market
manufacture could create these PLUGS for the OEM's product line
and even for legacy devices," says Abrams.
Such a technology could be used to save the expense of simply
discarding current devices. The question remains whether this
would be a short-lived, transitional technology, existent only
until new devices emerged with the Cell as an integral
component.
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Article Source: http://www.PopularArticles.com/article13397.html |
Article: Swift, Small, "Cell" Broadband Chip; Applications in Higher
Education
Author: David Geer
Total Views: 19
Word Count: 1330
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