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IBM, Sony, Toshiba Unveil Microprocessor
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=528&ncid=528&e=1&u=/ap/20050207/ap_on_hi_te/cell_processor

By MATTHEW FORDAHL, AP Technology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - Setting up a battle for the future of computing, engineers from IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details Monday of a microprocessor they claim has the muscle of a supercomputer and can power everything from video game consoles to business computers.

Devices built with the processor, code-named Cell, will compete directly with the PC chips that have powered most of the world's personal computers for a quarter century.

Cell's designers say their chip, built from the start with the burgeoning world of rich media and broadband networks in mind, can deliver 10 times the performance of today's PC processors.

It also will not carry the same technical baggage that has made most of today's computers compatible with older PCs. That architectural divergence will challenge the current dominant paradigm of computing that Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. have fostered.

The new chip is expected to be used in Sony Corp's next-generation PlayStation game console. Toshiba Corp. plans to incorporate it into high-end televisions. And IBM Corp. has said it will sell a workstation with the chip starting later this year.

Beyond that, companies are remaining coy about where it might be used and whether it will be compatible with older technology.

Supercomputer claims are nothing new in the high-tech industry, and over the years chip and computer companies have steadily improved microprocessor performance even without altering chips' underlying architecture.

And while its competitors may well match the Cell chip in performance by the time it debuts in 2006, it differs considerably from today's processors in constitution.

Cell is comprised of several computing engines, or cores. A core based on IBM's Power architecture controls eight "synergistic" processing centers. In all, they can simultaneously carry out 10 instruction sequences, compared with two for today's Intel chips.

The new microprocessor also is expected to be able to run multiple operating systems and programs at the same time while ensuring each has enough resources. In the home, that could allow for a device that's capable of handling a video game, television and general-purpose computer at once.

"It's very flexible," said Jim Kahle, an IBM fellow. "We support many operating systems with our virtualization technology so we can run multiple operating systems at the same time, doing different jobs on the system."

Later this year, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plan to release their own "multicore" chips, which also increase the number of instructions that can be executed at once. IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. already sell chips with multiple cores, mainly for business servers.

On Monday, Intel announced that it has completed the first product runs of its dual-core processors and said it plans to deliver two separate dual-core Pentium chips and chipsets in the second quarter.

Cell appears to have an advantage in the number of transistors — 234 million compared with 125 million for today's latest Pentium 4 chips. Traditional chip makers, however, have regularly doubled their number of transistors every 12 to 18 months.

Cell is said to run at clock speeds greater than 4 gigahertz, which would top the 3.8 GHz of Intel's current top-speed chip.

Cell's designers said they are running a variety of operating systems on the processor at their lab in Austin, Texas. But they would not say whether Microsoft's Windows is one of them. In fact, they only confirmed running Linux (news - web sites), the open source environment.

The PC industry has seen a long line of chips attempt to usurp the x86 architecture pioneered by Intel that dominates today's computers. But all have failed, and Intel remains the world's largest chip maker.

In the 1990s, IBM, Motorola Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. pushed the PowerPC architecture. Though it's still used by the Apple Macintosh (news - web sites) as well as IBM workstations and servers, it failed to dethrone Intel.

Most recently, Transmeta Corp (news - web sites).'s Crusoe was supposed to challenge Intel's dominance in notebooks. Launched at the twilight of the tech boom in 2000, it gained only marginal acceptance and the company is now considering plans to focus on licensing its patents.

Intel has since developed its own mobile chip technology, Centrino.

"Transmeta was also a disruptive influence in the market. And because of Transmeta, we've got Centrino and the advances that have happened in mobile computing," said Steve Kleynhans, a Meta Group analyst. "Unfortunately, we don't really have Transmeta anymore."

For a challenger to succeed in displacing x86, it will have to perform considerably better since it also will break computing's long-standing tradition of backward and forward compatibility, said Justin Rattner, who oversees Intel's Corporate Technology Group.

"They're going to have to show they're able to do things that conventional architectures at least at the moment are incapable of doing," he said. "That's the fundamental question."

The Cell's specifications also suggest the PlayStation 3 will offer realistic graphics and strong performance. But analysts cautioned that not all the features in a product announcement will find their way into all systems built on the device.

"Any new technology like this has two components," Kleynhans said. "It has the vision of what it could be because you need the big vision to sell it. Then there's the reality of how it's really going to be used, which generally several levels down the chain from there."

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Hanging Robots to Help Demolish Gutted Tower

Feb 18, 12:07 PM (ET)

MADRID (Reuters) - Robots suspended from cranes will help demolish the skeleton of one of Madrid's tallest buildings destroyed by a weekend fire because the ruin is too dangerous to be handled by workers, city authorities said Friday.

Demolition of the 32-storey skyscraper in the heart of Madrid, which is poised above four underground train lines, a major road and a vast department store, still presents unknown difficulties.

An alternative proposal to blow up the building in a controlled demolition, after first filling the network of subterranean road tunnels

below it with sand, had been rejected as too risky, the city hall said.

"We've ruled out a total collapse of the building, but not partial collapses," the city hall's head of building control, Emilio Garcia de Burgos, told a news conference.

The 106-meter (350 foot) high Windsor building, Madrid's eighth tallest tower, was reduced to a peeling, blackened ruin by the biggest blaze in the city's history last weekend.

It is now too unstable to send workers in so it will be demolished by cranes from the top down, with giant neoprene sheets in place to catch falling debris, Garcia de Burgos said.

"We have never had to work in these conditions before," he added.

Robots will be used to help cut up the sagging concrete and steel structure, he said, adding that demolition should be finished within 12 months.

The construction company in charge of carrying out the work, under city hall direct ion, described the job as unusual rather than plain difficult.
"It's unusual, emblematic because of its height, its location, the way it is embedded in the city and the lack of space around the building," said Julio Miquel, secretary general of the company, Ortiz Construcciones y Proyectos.

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China Rings in New Year with 11 Billion Messages

Feb 18, 8:15 AM (ET)

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese mobile phone users sent a record 11 billion text messages during the week-long Spring Festival holiday, ringing in the Lunar New Year in style, Xinhua news agency said Friday.

The holiday is the most important family reunion of the year, and the SMS calls brought in more than 1.1 billion yuan ($133 million), also a record, it said.< /p>

"In addition to text messages, people sent pictures and songs via their mobile phones as festival greetings," Xinhua said.

By the end of 2004, Chinese mobile phone users had surpassed 330 million. They sent a total of 217.7 billion messages last year.

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Jef Raskin, Macintosh Creator, Dies at 61

Mon Feb 28,11:00 AM ET

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

Jef Raskin, the lead designer of the first Macintosh (news - web sites) computer and a pioneer in the development of user interfaces, died Saturday at age 61. He had been diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer, his family says in a statement.

Raskin joined Apple Computer in 1978 as employee number 31 and headed the company's Macintosh development team from its founding in 1982. He named the project after his favorite type of apple, changing the spelling for copyright reasons.

He is credited with significantly advancing the design of user interfaces, which in the early 1980s were largely text-based and required users to memorize complex commands. Raskin convinced his peers at Apple that to reach a wider audience, the Macintosh needed an interface that was elegant and easy to use.

"Up to that time, at Apple and most other manufacturers, the concept was to provide the latest and most powerful hardware, and let the users and third-party software vendors figure out how to make it usable," he wrote later on his Web site.

Raskin left Apple in 1982, two years before the Macintosh went on sale, but he continued to influence the design of computers through his writing, lectures, and consulting work. Soon after leaving the company he founded Information Appliance, where he designed the Canon Cat computer for Canon USA, although the product was not a commercial success.

His consulting clients have included Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and many other big names in computing. In 2000 he published a book, "The Humane Interface," that is widely assigned at universities.

Recent Projects

Raskin was currently at work on a project called Archy, where he hoped to put many of the ideas expressed in his book into software. Archy uses simple commands for common operations in word processing and e-mail, but "doesn't work like anything else on this or nearby planets," meaning users would have to learn it from scratch, he wrote on his Web site.

His son, Aza Raskin, will continue to develop the project, a preview version of which is due out later this year, his family says in the statement.

Raskin's interests were not restricted to computers: He taught the recorder, harpsichord, and music theory at San Francisco Community College in the 1970s, and his family described him as an orchestral soloist and composer. He also founded a company that designed and sold radio-controlled model aircraft.

Along with Aza, he is survived by his wife, Linda Blum, and his other children, Aviva and Aenea. Raskin lived most recently in Pacifica, California.

More information about Jef Raskin is available at his Web site, www.jefraskin.com. More information about Archy is at www.raskincenter.org.

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The End of Transistors In Computers?

Thu Mar 3, 3:33 PM ET

Pam Baker, www.newsfactor.com

Hewlett Packard (NYSE: HPQ - news) researchers created a computer-world frenzy with the recent announcement of a new invention designed to replace transistors on chips -- the fundamental building block of computers for the last half century. But is the buzz just bluff or the stuff of real scientific advancement?

"HP is a long way off, not in the science, but in terms of the limits of the current business environment. It will take at least ten years for the industry to retool," Yankee Group analyst Andy Efstathiou told NewsFactor.

Re-inventing at Molecular Scale

In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physics, three members of HP Labs' Quantum Science Research (QSR) group described their invention as a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.

The technology could result in computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those that exist today. "We are re-inventing the computer at the molecular scale," says Stan Williams, HP senior fellow and QSR director, and one of the authors of the paper.

"The crossbar latch provides a key element needed for building a computer using nanometer-sized devices that are relatively inexpensive and easy to build," he added.

QSR works on nanoscale electronic devices that will first supplement, and someday perhaps replace, silicon technology, which is expected to reach its physical limits in about a decade. But, such a replacement could devastate chipmakers and turn the entire industry on its ear.

"Any truly new technology requires an entire industry to support it -- an entire new infrastructure -- and retooling takes years. Plus, products have to be adapted to be compatible to a radical change," Manny Vara, manufacturing side spokesperson for Intel, told NewsFactor.

The Race Is On

"Everyone's looking for an answer. No one can make transistors too much smaller and still keep them operable," says Vara.

Certainly, Intel is there for the count. The giant chipmaker currently produces the world's smallest transistor -- about 50 nanometers – half the size of a flu virus. The Pentium 4 has 150 million transistors.

"Think of a processor as a brain and transistors as brain cells. The more brain cells you have, the smarter the brain," says Vara.

Intel researchers also are experimenting with ways to advance transistor development: using new materials to build better transistors; transforming the common planar, or flat, transistor into a Tri-gate 3-D transistor; and, exploring whether transistors can be built from nano devices like carbon nanotubes and nano wires, says Vara.

"What can be enhanced or added to a silicon chip to increase performance and time-to-market?'" Vara muses.

But HP researchers are taking a different tack.

The crossbar latches use a sequence of voltage impulses to the control lines and arrange switches in opposite polarities. As a result, they can perform the three basic operations that comprise the primary logic of a circuit and are essential for basic computer functions.

The new latch technology could restore a circuit to its ideal voltage. That would let designers chain many simple gates together, allowing them to perform computations.

"These types of advancement are mission-critical to the long-term
survival of any player in the industry," says Efstathiou.

Beyond the Finish Line

In addition to exploring the fundamental scientific principles of computing at the molecular level, QSR also is looking at architectural issues and determining how such tiny devices -- thousands of which could fit across the diameter of a human hair -- could be fabricated economically and in mass quantities.

Meanwhile, Intel Israel has spent the last two to three years developing the electro-optic chip at the company's Jerusalem facility to replace the standard electronic chips used for communications between computer components, allowing this communication to be conducted at the speed of light -- 10 times the current speed.

"Today, the fast processors operate at speeds over three gigahertz, but their surroundings still work at speeds of hundreds of megahertz and, therefore, don't succeed in exploiting their speeds," Amir Elstein, the co-CEO of Intel Israel and director of Intel's Jerusalem facility told reporters. "When the chips, the processor and the ports of the computer speak at the same speed, which will be about 10 gigahertz, the computer's capability will be totally different," he added.

"None of these advancements will happen tomorrow -- but when they do, there will be far more progress than we have yet experienced, and it will be highly disruptive technology," says Frost & Sullivan senior strategic analyst Ronald Gruia.

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