The highly anticipated microchip that will power the Sony PlayStation 3 game system made its debut on Monday, as IBM , Sony Corp. (6758.T) and Toshiba Corp. (6502.T) showed off the inner workings of a chip intended to run a new generation of electronics.
Dubbed a "supercomputer on a chip," the Cell microprocessor has until now been long on ambition but short on specifics. At a technical conference in San Francisco, the three electronics giants described a chip that could provide ten times the performance of the latest PC chips and churn through many tasks at once.
Aimed squarely at the "digital home" market highly sought-after by Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news), the Cell initiative, which has been in development since 2001, is viewed by some as a formidable, if fledgling, competitor to the world's largest chip maker.
While IBM showed off prototypes of the Cell processor here, Intel demonstrated that the Cell chip's grand goals will not go unchallenged, announcing that it had completed initial product runs of its own "dual-core" chips, which have the brains of two chips in one.
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