clusters, which can be used on systems such as IBM's JS20 blade servers. And, Staats added, "Things are already in motion to enable a world of greater Power Architecture diversity."
Colin Charles, a lead programmer for the effort to bring the Fedora version of Linux to PowerPC chips, pledged future support for the project.
I'm not going to back off the project, even if it means that its real use will only last another two more years, and after that, it'll just be for big iron IBM (computers)," Charles said. "IBM hardware will always still exist, though consumer Apple stuff is going away in about two years, sadly--I think it's a big mistake."
Snubbed in public
The Apple divorce was very public. Apple CEO
Steve Jobs sharply criticized IBM's PowerPC production during his Worldwide
Developer Conference keynote address earlier this week,
spotlighting the fact that his company couldn't deliver a promised 3GHz PowerPC
processor or a laptop with the latest G5 generation chip.
"We can envision some amazing products we want to build for you, but we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map," Jobs said.
IBM's response is to fight back with numbers, calling out In-Stat statistics forecasting that the game console market will grow from 3.5 million units this year to 33.5 million in 2008. Sony, the top seller of game consoles, is using the Cell chip in its future Playstation 3, due in 2006. And Microsoft's Xbox 360, due later this year, uses a Power processor that Beck said is code-named Waternoose.
IBM hopes Cell will be used by new customers beyond gaming, though. To that end, Big Blue released an open-source version of Power computer "firmware"--software that runs beneath the operating system, helps a computer boot up and provides operating system access to many hardware features.
It also released software specifications that let programmers use the unusual architecture of Cell itself. The chip has a single Power processing core aided by eight other cores IBM calls specialized processor units. In game consoles, the eight helper cores handle graphics tasks, but IBM wants to let programmers use them for other tasks, such as encryption or image processing.
Using the extra cores is unwieldy now, though. "We need to make the programming model simpler," Beck said, and IBM hopes opening the Cell specification will help others steer IBM in the right direction for programming tool improvement.
Beyond gaming
Two nongaming customers are using Cell, Beck said,
though he wouldn't name them. One is involved in medical imaging, and the other
is tapping the chip for military use in image recognition and targeting, he
said.
Though others in the Power.org consortium may offer suggestions on what features should be added to Power processors, IBM isn't giving up control over chip design features such as the set of instructions it can execute. Power.org members "wanted transparency--to see proposals for the instruction set architecture coming in and out--but they did not want democracy," Beck said.
Eleven new organizations joined the 16 existing members of the Power.org consortium. Among them are AboveMicro Technologies, which provides custom chip design services; Celestica, which designs and builds computers often sold under other companies' names; Rapport, which sells chips that can be reconfigured on the fly; TimeLab, which builds chips to replace analog circuitry; and Universal Scientific Industrial, which designs Power-based home media centers
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