PlayStation 3 chip has split personality

The chip that will run the next version of the PlayStation video game machine will have nine processor cores and run faster than 4GHz, the chip’s designers revealed Monday.

Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba revealed those and other specifications for the Cell processor during a press conference at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where technical papers on the Cell design will be presented this week.

The three companies have been working on Cell for several years, promising to deliver a high-performance chip optimized for multimedia applications. Test production of Cell chips is set to begin later this year, and the processors will appear later in workstation PCs optimized for animation and other graphics chores. The chip will also power the next version of Sony’s PlayStation game console, which is widely expected to be released late this year or early next year.

While analysts and researchers have already puzzled out most of the basic aspects of the Cell design, Monday’s announcements included some of the first specifics.

Cell will have a 64-bit IBM Power processor and eight “synergistic processing units” capable of handling separate computing tasks, said Jim Kahle, an IBM Fellow. The Power processor will act as the brain of the chip, running the main operating system for an application and divvying up chores for the other processors.

The eight “synergistic” processors are a step forward from current computing system designs, in which the graphics chip draws pixels and the central processor does everything else. The Cell cores have media-specific instructions baked in, but they are flexible and smart enough to handle nonmedia tasks, said Brian Flachs, an IBM engineer. “It represents an important middle ground between graphics processors and central processors,” he said.

The multicore design will give software developers tremendous flexibility, Kahle said, allowing them to run multiple operating systems on the same chip and experiment with variations on grid computing.