Earlier this year IBM, Sony and Toshiba announced the Cell chip and, if you believe everything you read, it could be the processor to change everything. It’s got eight cores, with local memory, and managed by a central core based around IBM’s PowerPC CPU. It’s claimed Cell can reach speeds of 4.8GHz, and outperform single-core Intel and AMD processors by a factor of ten. Distributed processing is apparently another benefit. If you have a network of Cell systems, then any busy processors will share their workload around, and so use their resources as efficiently as possible. Which is handy, as the PlayStation 3 will be powered by Cell. However, there are reasons to doubt some of these details. The PlayStation 2 used a Sony and Toshiba CPU – the Emotion Engine – that was supposed to outperform everything else. It never happened. Furthermore, the Cell’s eight cores are simplified vector CPUs, fine for some math tasks, but not for running applications. It may run selected synthetic benchmarks ‘ten times faster than a Pentium’, but real world tests won’t see anything close to that. Factor in distributed processing, cost and power consumption, and the problems begin to look significant.
When you’re used to dealing with desktop PCs and Windows, it’s easy to think that there’s nothing else in the PC world. Yet you’d be wrong. How wrong? Try this. While Intel and AMD are thinking about giving us four-core processors in 2007, proper production in 2008 if we’re lucky, Sun Microsystems have been pressing ahead with their own Niagara CPU. This features eight cores, which can each run up to eight threads simultaneously, providing up to 64 virtual CPUs. Is this overkill? For desktop users, yes, but this is aimed at the server market. It’s expected to be available in early 2006 and gives us some idea of the kind of technology that the rest of us will be using around 2010 (when it just might be affordable by the average consumer). Not everyone is aiming at the high end of the market, though. Earlier this year Fujitsu announced the FR550, which is armed with four 32-bit cores each capable of executing up to eight threads simultaneously. ‘Only’ 32-bit? Yes, but then again, the CPU only consumes a tiny 3W of power. It’s apparently going to appear in ‘high definition TVs and digital entertainment products’, with the first releases expected at the end of 2005. Looks like the future really is multi-core, and it’s arriving sooner than we think.
