There's nothing quite like a Cell processor news story to start off your day, and this morning we've got a cracker. Delivering a lecture in Austin Texas, the father of Cell himself, Peter Hofstee told a group of eager onlookers how the PS3 is going to be more powerful than a Vindaloo from a Newcastle curry house.
Speaking about IBM's work on the Cell project, Hofstee was quick to note that Sony - and particularly the PlayStation father - had a lot of influence on the PS3 processor. "It really was Sony and Ken Kutaragi that was the driver for this project," he said. "He spent quite a bit of money on it. $400 million for a processor...this is about as serious as it gets." "Remarkably," he added, "this chip is almost exactly the same size, in square millimetres, as the first chip that went into the PlayStation2."
The Cell designer then touched on the trials of designing a chip for a game console: "With game processors," Hofstee noted, "because of the economics of how game systems seems to have worked in the past - you always have to wait and see if it works that way going forward - is that game developers get a stable platform for five or six years." "And because that is sort of how it works," he added, "there is a big focus on chip size and power and cost reduction over that period."
When asked by our friends over at Next-Gen.biz how he felt, as a scientist, working inside the wonderful world of videogames, Hofstee said: "I think games are an interesting application area, but quite clearly, Cell is not just for games. There are many other areas it can be used. Games are the thing that inspired us to do it."
"I think the biggest problem is to find ways to make [Cell] effective for the programmers," said Hofstee. "My dream is that everyone who has a PlayStation can start programming with Cell."
With the PlayStation 3 apparently set to arrive at around 350 GBP, lets hope that Sony's much-touted processor is worth every penny.
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