IBM-Sony-Toshiba Introducing SuperBrain Chip

[DudeAsInCool]

BM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal ‘superbrain chip’

By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco

February 6 2005 18:29

Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a “supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise communications, multimedia and consumer electronics.

* Advance reports suggest the chip is significantly more powerful and versatile than the next generation of micro-processors announced by the consortium's competitors

*..This will improve the quality of video delivered over the broadband internet and increase the fidelity of computer games.

* Cell's architecture is described as scalable from “small consumer devices to massive supercomputers”

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6b31ebfe-786b-11d...000e2511c8.html

[DudeAsInCool]

Smaller Than a Pushpin, More Powerful Than a PC

By JOHN MARKOFF

Published: February 7, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 6 - In a new volley in the battle for digital home entertainment, I.B.M., Sony and Toshiba will announce details Monday of their newest microprocessor design, known as Cell, which is expected to offer faster computing performance than microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

Anticipation of the announcement, to be made at an industry conference here, has touched off widespread industry speculation over the impact of the new chip technology, which promises to enhance video gaming and digital home entertainment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/technology/07chip.html

[DudeAsInCool]

Slate chimes in:

One of the few long-term projects at HP Labs is a small nanochip fabrication setup that makes circuits one-third the size of the most advanced chips currently on the market. The nanolab is a clean-room facility, so I have to settle for pressing my nose up against the window. On the other side of the glass, a line of nano-imprinting machines, each the size of a McDonald's fry cooker, represent smaller and smaller scales of development. At the far end of a room about a dozen feet square, a chubby lab worker in an androgynous clean-room bunny suit peers through eyepieces at the latest test run.

The technology is simple to describe, if incredibly hard to produce. Today's microchip plants imprint circuits on coated silicon wafers by shining light through a stencil. Since circuits have now gotten smaller than the wavelength of the laser light that's used to etch them, it's getting very expensive to go smaller using the stencil technique. Instead of using light, HP's nano-imprint machine stamps the circuit design by squeezing a drop of liquid into a mold, then hardening it into a grooved circular disk. After that, it's chip manufacturing as usual—the grooves are filled with platinum to make wire circuits.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2113101/

Working in miniature

The group's ponytailed director leads me to a microscope that looks down at one of the finished chips. It's kind of a letdown—I can't see much, other than to verify that the chip is really, really small. Neither me nor the director wants to fuss with the microscope and risk breaking the chip, so I just pull my face away and squint down with my two naked eyes. And there it is, lying at the bottom of the microscope tray: a black square with an orderly grid of wires leading into it. It's the smallest computer chip I've ever seen.

There are two roadblocks to making a working microprocessor—or is it a nanoprocessor?—using this kind of technology. First, there's the basic entropy of the universe. No matter how precise the manufacturing process, when you make something this small, about 3 percent of the parts will turn out to be defective. Ninety-seven percent sounds like a pretty good success rate, but for chip makers that's suicidally catastrophic failure, something like having the pilot get on the PA and announce that 3 percent of the parts on your 747 have gone screwy.

Instead of futilely trying to fix those tiny broken parts, HP's scientists have come up with a work-around. One computer architect explained this all to me in terms of "defect theology." It starts with original sin: All components are presumed bad at creation. They must redeem themselves through good works—by passing software diagnostic tests that get run sequentially on groups of components. By testing components in different groups, the system eventually deduces which individual parts are broken. It excommunicates those and carries on computing with the rest.

The second problem with HP's nanochips was that they were too small to include any transistors, the basic component of computer logic circuits. Without transistors, you can have a memory chip but not a CPU, the kind of processor that will boot Windows. But in a paper published in the Journal of Applied Physics this week, three HP scientists explain that they've created logic circuits without transistors using a new building block called a crossbar latch. In short, that means HP's nanochips will perform the exact same functions as today's microchips.