Of the Cell, Ken Kutaragi has said, “[It] will make possible a transformation in entertainment like that from novels to movies.” Quite the most staggering comment to arise from a games executive in some time.
This was said by the PlayStation boss following confirmation that the Cell will indeed be shown at the International Solid State Circuits Conference to be held in San Francisco on Sunday. We’ll have to wait until the 8th of the month and the final day of the conference for a fully outlined spec.
A report on Forbes claims to have gained something of a scoop on what may be announced. According to the news service, a single Cell chip is expected to be capable of surpassing 250 billion floating point operations, or 250 gigaflops, per second, rivalling the best mid-1990s supercomputer. Impressive if true.
The piece also has comment from a Sony Cell engineer who, under terms of anonymity said, “It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is in its flexibility." The processor, it was claimed, will be able to “link millions of people into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.”
The engineer continued, “You couldn't imagine how fast it will be. It will be able to make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff needed to produce such quality.”
We will have to wait and see. It is widely thought that the Cell research and development phase is lagging well behind schedule right now. At this time last year, technical demonstrations, initially to Sony’s partners, followed by public showing of some sort of another were promised for late summer. To date, nothing has been seen.