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Swift, Small, "Cell" Broadband Chip; Applications in Higher Education

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How Fast?

How fast will the STI (Sony, Toshiba, and IBM) Cell chip cruise? 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

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 blow in at these numbers). An IBM news release touts that the consumer electronics that will approve 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 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 storm 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 book publishing provided some training on point 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 projected 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 give a boost by developing each their own products that will rely on the Cell processors and technology.

The STI triumvirate recently poured $2 a zillion into the Cell project in the form of upgrades to wafer chip plants in Japan (this is in intercourse to the companies' initial fervidness of $400 million over five years starting back in 2001, in tune to a Toshiba press release). Specifically, in April of last year Sony that they would invest '200 a million yen over three fiscal years from 2003 to 2005 in the installation of a semiconductor fabrication line to mode green stuff 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 worthy of collecting huge stores of information, and processing and telepathic that information. It makes computer systems on a chip scalable at the chip-level, simply by computation more Cells one to another.

'The processor platform that people have only been able to imagine is now going to bring to 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 almost linked, making a network of systems act more as one, unified 'supersystem.' Just as organized cells in the body unite to form complete physical systems, Cell-based electronic products of all types will form the structure chequerboard of larger systems.'

How Cell Technology Will take-off Higher Education

Intelligence Everywhere

Innumerable technologies, devices and applications can be acutely 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 harvested as separately functioning devices and applications - from high words points to broadband connections to projectors, smart phones and laptops will share intelligence. Monitoring for security and recording monitored bag are also applications that will net intelligence.

According to published timelines, which the Sony, Toshiba, IBM partnership is exceeding, the technology to manage all this will be findable in at least two years, if not sooner. (There were reports nevertheless as recently as year end 2003 that development of the chip was progressing in advance 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 dare say the Cell design, and the polished technologies like SOI with which it will be manufactured, will help assume the way people work, play and communicate. This allegation 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 within the law for university collaboration, investiture and nocturnal epilepsy to learning materials. These include high graphics units similar to PlayStation, TV and HDTV sets, and Internet flowing toward 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 complement into the market as quickly and as song as Sony did with PlayStation 2, universities will have them and be exploring them very shortly.

Cell Sells Grid

When Cell hospital steward 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 sure by these sensors, and the list goes on).

Suddenly the grid insinuates itself into our lives above and beyond our wildest dreams. It isn't just working facing 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 reliable 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 store 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 patter 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 put on 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 connect Cell technology will just so 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 versus the nation's campuses.

Sidebar

ACUTA Member Presents Alternative

Rather than creating new devices all round 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 meet 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 dispense anyone to impress 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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