IBM + SONY + TOSHIBA = ?? Cell

Well a decade ago the processor market was a virtual monopoly of the Intel corporation, But AMD’s persistance has cut intel’s margins sharply. And now its widely accepted that AMD’s dual cores are way ahead of Intel’s.

But away from all these IBM with SONY and Toshiba, is waiting for a debut in the big processor league. If whatever is promised is really achieved we could have a super computer inside an IBM branded processor (‘Cell’). Running with eight cores, the prototype chip is 221 mm2, integrates 234 million transistors, and is fabricated with 90 nm SOI technology. It promises to clock at 4GHZ. Clock speed is not big deal anymore..after AMD’s slower clocking processors consistantly beat their higher clocking Intel counterparts.So we cant compare Intel’s 4GHZ processor with the IBM’s “Cell” which could provide 10 times the processing power of any modern processors.

And not just the processor, but a new memory system XDR which supports datarates upto 8GHZ, and FlexIO processor buses (formerly Redwood) are capable of running up to 6.4 GHz data rates providing a claimed bandwidth that is more than four times faster than best-of-class processor buses available today.

The ‘Cell’ is expected to debut in Sony’s playstation, followed by TV’s and then to mainstream PC market..So lets get ready for bigger things!!

ntel inside Apple outside !!

The Big transition of the Apple has happened, Now Apple iMac has intel under its hood.Steve Jobs pointed that the new iMacs are twice as fater than their immediate predecessors, but detractors point to the fact that the benchmark tests dont work in reality.
But then I always wondered if the Mac's G5 processors are really good then why didn't the G5's become as popular as the Intel's or AMD's.If the G5 was good steve would have introduced it to the market and tried to compete against the Intel.But now the reason for going Intel is obvious, rather than wasting a feature packed PC like the Mac by using a slower processor, get the best one in the market.And moreover we can never expect the G5 to match up with the improvements introduced by the processor specific companies, and as the days go the gap between mainstream processors with the apple version wud only increase..So probably now is better than never.
Well now the processor side imac has been unbundled, lets wait to see if a similar transition in software side wud occur.........Till then probably I will wait to have a Mac.