http://money.cnn.com/2003/11/14/technology/ibm_cpu.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes?cnn=yes
IBM builds new supercomputer
Big Blue says TV-sized device can perform 2 trillion calculations per
second.
November 14, 2003: 7:22 AM EST
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. said
Friday
that it has built a supercomputer the size of a television based on
microchip technology to be used in gaming consoles due out next year.
IBM (IBM: Research, Estimates) said the supercomputer, which can perform 2
trillion calculations per second, is a small-scale prototype of the Blue
Gene/L supercomputer that it is building for the Lawrence Livermore
National
Laboratory in California.
The computer made it onto the Top 500 supercomputer list, which is
compiled
by a member of the University of Tennessee's computer science department.
IBM vice president of technology and strategy Irving Wladawsky-Berger said
that the supercomputer used 1,000 microprocessors that are based on
PowerPC
microchip technology. The PowerPC chip is currently used in Apple Computer
Inc. (AAPL: Research, Estimates) computers.
It is also the technology that will be the foundation of the next
generation
of gaming consoles from Nintendo Co. and Sony Corp., which IBM is working
on, he said.
He said the chips were less expensive and consumed less power than
traditional microprocessors, making it possible to pack the same amount of
computing power into a smaller space. Producing the chips in volume for
gaming will help offset the costs of building supercomputers, he said.
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