IBM, Sony and Toshiba have developed a chip that can
deliver processing speeds of 4GHz – twice as fast as the Montecito
chip unveiled by Intel on Monday.
At this week’s International Solid State Circuits Conference in
the US, the three partners said their new chip, codenamed Cell,
would go into production later this year and would power both
commercial and consumer PCs and devices.
The prototype multi-core Cell chip has 234 million transistors
and incorporates multi-processing technology used in IBM’s existing
top-of-the-range servers.
Cell will allow multiple operating systems to be run on a single
hardware platform, otherwise known as "virtualisation".
Intel launched the Montecito chip to offer users processing
speeds of 2GHz, a step up from the 1.6GHz possible with its Itanium
range of processors.
