November 20th, 2009 at 5:53 am -

It has been confirmed that IBM will be pulling out of Cell development, with their current PowerXCell 8i to be the company’s last entrance in the technology.

The Cell Processor was originally the brain child of ‘The Father of PlayStation’ Ken Kutaragi. It was later co-developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba; making its way into the PlayStation 3, TV’s and super computers.

Featuring a central general-purpose processor, the Cell includes a number of co-processing units with internal memory, known as SPUs. Greatly increasing performance, the Cell’s SPUs have been notoriously difficult to develop for, with a number of developers, such as Naughty Dog, making significant breakthroughs of late.

IBM’s most recent development in the Cell Processor’s design is the PoweXCell 8i, which is featured in the second most powerful supercomputer in the world; Roadrunner.

However, this is where Cell will end for IBM. The company’s Vice President David Turek, told German website Heise Online that the planned 32 SPE Cell processor will not be made.

However, Turek did explain that features of the Cell would continue to be moulded into other processor designs. With the future looking like it’s taking a GPU route, a hybrid technology is the direction IBM will developing.

So what does this mean for Sony and the PlayStation 4? It has long been understood that the platform holder wants to use the Cell processor once again, allowing them to take advantage of this generation’s research and to make the transition into the next much smoother.

Will this change with IBM pulling out of their own development? Not necessarily. Sony can still hire IBM to create a Cell Processor for their next console, without IBM being involved in their own internal development outside of the PS4. So don’t start counting Sony’s chickens just yet.

http://www.playstationuniversity.com/ibm-cancels-cell-processor-development-1295/

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Interesting stuff! So at this point the IBM has washed their hands of the architecture. So that means that they will develop no new Cell chips and the 32 SPE Cell that was in development will not be finished. I guess this raises the strong possiblilty that the Cell will not be in  the PS4.

Already posted, and no.

it will be evolved.

into something else, so no. hybrid processors are here to stay.

next cell won't be called cell and probably be multiple core and spu design

Already posted.

intresting stuff, guess no one knows that it will mean, Cant Sony just carry on with it without IBM?

Already posted, and this won't change much.

Where else is it posted? I must have missed it.

Anyways, IBM is the one with the most chip design experience. That would be a huge blow.

The design concepts will be integrated into future processors. All this is rally saying is that IBM is pulling out of inventing direct successors to the Cell itself -- it doesn't say anything about Toshiba (who could still continue Cell development, if they chose, and will certainly continue to reduce the Cell die size, to produce PS3s even more cheaply), nor does it say anything about IBM/Toshiba ceasing production of the original Cell.

The Cell will live on, in concept, in pretty much every high-performance CPU down the road. Removing the Cell branding (which is all IBM is doing, really) merely allows the CPU concepts that the Cell pioneered to evolve faster (at least via IBM).

This announcement is the equivalent of Harmonix announcing that they won't be making Guitar Hero any longer... and then going on to make Rock Band.

^- already posted too. :P

@topic: i dont think this will have much impact to sony's plan's.

Probably used all the dark matter up.