Back in July, Alpha Doggs wrote about scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California giving the processor inside Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 3 a thumbs-up as a lower-cost alternative to Opteron and Itanium chips. The scientists found the chip to be eight times faster and at least eight times more power-efficient than the traditional server chips from Intel and AMD.
The chip is enjoying the limelight again this month as both my colleagues Network World Senior Editors Phil Hochmuth and Deni Connor have given the chip some column inches in their recent newsletters.
Phil wrote that the Department of Energy’s next great supercomputer, named Roadrunner, will feature the chip, officially known as Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE), running Linux. Read his Linux newsletter here.
Meanwhile Deni, in her Servers newsletter, goes into a little more depth about the Roadrunner. Read her Servers newsletter here.
And in an earlier issue of her newsletter, Deni explains how the STI (Sony Toshiba IBM) Cell processor works. Read that newsletter here.
Linda Leung, lleung@nww.com
