SONY UNLEASHES CELL PROCESSOR

There is a hardware juggernaut about to be thrust into the console gaming arena, and it has far reaching potential to yet again, according to Sony, revolutionize console gaming and consumer electronic devices. CELL is the result of a collaboration between Sony, Toshiba, and IBM to create the next generation of CPU's to power tomorrows electronics. The CELL processor will contain a whopping nine processor cores, be capable of 250 GigaFLOPs (Translation: 250 Billion Floating Point Operations Per Second), and run at a clock of 4.6 Ghz. Its been called the supercomputer on a chip, although most of the world's supercomputers start at around a TFLOP. It is yet unknown whether this version of the Cell will actually appear in the next generation console, Playstation 3, although there have been a lot of rumors indicating that a scaled down version of CELL will appear most certainly appear in the PS3. Sony has been touting CELL as the main processor for their upcoming console.

The big question I have about it is how much the Playstation 3 will end up costing the end user upon release when it contains a CELL CPU, a Hard Drive, Broadband adapter, and likely Blue-Ray disc media. All I can figure is that the PS3 will likely cost at least 100 dollars more than the PS2 did at a price point of 399.99.

One of the most impressive features of the cell processor is that it is designed to be scalable, meaning that the more CELL's that are networked together the greater their collective computing power becomes. It's like a matrix of individual computing cells that act as one giant organism superprocessor when they are linked. On current computers today, when a CPU is idle it can not share computing power with another computer on the network if another machine needed more CPU time to complete a very intensive operation. CELL utilizes idle CPU's or unused CPU cycles to assist other CPU's running software on a network of units. Essentially though, a task could be divided amongst the collective of all units connected to a network, allowing for theoretically exponentially scalable CPU power. The potential for something like this, is that if CELL is processing graphics or polygon vertices and wanted to process more than it could handle, it would divert that

Around the turn of the century that I commented that by 2010 we ought to be playing video games with photorealistic graphics, however the potential of something like CELL allows for that notion to exist in this generation of consoles by 2005 and 2006. Hype from Sony of course is nothing new, considering prior to PS2's launch some bold claims were made about polygon counts (Emotion Engine anyone, LOL!) that it seemed were never actually achieved. It's likely that irregardless of hype or not, the next generation of consoles will be capable of pushing in the neighborhood of a billion polygons per second. Of course utilizing new texturemapping techniques will allow for increased efficiency with lower polygon counts, allowing for higher resolutions and framerates. It is very likely the Playstation 3 games will be running at resolutions of 1080 progressive HD at 60 Frames Per Second. The PS3 may read new Blue-Ray readable High Definition DVD's.

The potential of this amazing technology can only be made manifest if the developers are able to exploit it. Incredible graphics will not guarantee that future video games will be fun by default. Of course all the games being released in the next generation will LOOK wonderful, however you wonder what sacrifices to gameplay will be made to focus on just graphics. Many of the great games of the past were regarded as unforgettable because they were fun to play rather than their graphics, however too, many of those same games more often than not had above average graphics and represented monumental efforts on shoestring budgets for developing new and innovative titles. I can only imagine that in the days of games for the SEGA Genesis or the NES, a developer receiving a 20 million dollar contract to make a game as is commonplace today. I long ago remember dwelling on the future of video games, a fully reactive 3-D world virtually indistinguishable from what is seen in reality, every blade of grass, the sinews of a muscle, the refraction of light off of a shiny tempered sword.

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