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Sony, IBM Announce Cell Workstation For PS3 Dev

Posted by simoniker on from the give-me-sequels-or-give-me-death dept.

Thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for its article discussing the little-heralded Sony announcement of a Sony and IBM co-developed, Cell-based workstation for PlayStation 3 (and other) content creation. The article explains: "The workstation, which will ship before the end of the year, will feature an architecture based on the parallel processing Cell chip [also to be used in the PlayStation 3], and will be designed to power digital content creation for movies, television and videogames." GI.Biz also quotes an un-named industry figure as suggesting: "Microsoft should be really worried by this... They've been touting Xbox 2 to their partners and talking about the kind of content they want to see created on the platform - more polygons, higher resolutions, more effects - and our response has been that the tools to create this stuff for games don't really exist yet. Now Sony has effectively created those tools."

2 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why is this good for Sony? by News+for+nerds · · Score: 3, Informative

    Cell is a generic grid-computing processor. It means, the same hardware block can be used in this workstation, PS3, rack-mount server, home appliance, and other devices from Sony and IBM. The difference between those various hardwares is only the quantity of Cells equiped in them, so this workstation is not specialized hardware bound to a specific market. When PS3 ships, the scale merit of Cell production will soar dramatically, which is what SGI couldn't do.

  2. Re:Isn't IBM also making the PPC chips for Xbox 2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Make that "playing all 3 sides", as they're also working with Nintendo on the "GCNext". IBM will make loads of money next generation no matter what happens. Lucky them.