The rumor sprang from an article on German website Heise Online, which posted a story about an interview with IBM's vice president of deep computing, David Turek, in which he indicated that the development of the next version of the Cell processor with dual PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements) had been halted. This led to many articles declaring the Cell processor dead.

Our immediate concern upon reading this, was the fate of the Sony PlayStation 3, so we dropped a line to IBM. Spokesperson Ron Favali returned our call and immediately assured us the PlayStation 3 was safe.

"As long as we have a contract with Sony we will continue to manufacture Cell processors for use in the Sony PlayStation."

Update: We also inquired at Sony, and received this response from Julia Han of SCEA corporate communications: "The IBM reports do not have anything to do with the cell chip used in the PS3. There will be no impact to the PS3 business."

So don't worry about Sony running out of chips anytime soon. IBM has them covered. As for the fate of the Cell processor technology? Well that will live on as well says Turek, as "the core technology of the Cell processor will continue to proliferate throughout the IBM product line."

Turek wouldn't comment on upcoming product announcements regarding the future of the Cell.

SC09: IBM lässt Cell-Prozessor auslaufen [Heise-Online via Fudzilla, Gizmodo]

If you own a 360, IBM made the Xenon chip that runs it. If you own a PS3, IBM helped make the Cell that power's Sony's machine. And IBM made the Broadway chip that runs the Wii.

The job cuts were designed to spur recent profits at the company, which are actually up 10% in recent weeks. Which is good news for shareholders, but for the 4000 sacked? At least if the company was going down the drain there'd be something more reasonable to blame.

IBM quietly cuts thousands of jobs [Associated Press]

Today, David Laux, global executive in charge of games and interactive entertainment at IBM, tells us that WoW makes good human beings. This is in the wake of job recruiters avoiding WoW players.

Here are some nice things Laux says about Wow:

The game produces tremendous leadership skills among players. It teaches you how to evaluate risk, build teams for specific tasks and it also teaches individuals not to over react if they are not selected for a specific task.

This David Laux guy seems more like a glass-is-half-full kinda guy.

Gaming is good for you [BBC]

If only we had had access to this sort of technology back in 1983. The movie WarGames would have been so much better. "Would you like to play a game? How about Resistance: Fall of Man?"

IBM unveils fast new computer for US Energy Dept. [Newsday.com]

IBM international foundation president Stanley S. Litow said, "Innovation is the key to competitiveness in today's globally integrated economy, but just when we need it to skyrocket, interest in math and science has been declining in the United States. American competitiveness demands more interest in math and science by students. Virtual worlds and 3D are an unexplored resource in education. We asked our best researchers to incorporate the use of this technology into traditional educational curriculum."

We'll see how popular this experiment winds up being, but I'm sure we'll see more of the same in the future. The game is launching today, and you can find details at the game website.

IBM Announces Environmental Learning MMO For Kids [Worlds In Motion]

IBM shrinks Cell to 45nm. Cheaper PS3s will follow [Ars Technica]

So it will be interesting to see if Microsoft opts to go with 45nm chips (available next year) and then 32nm chips, or ends up skipping one of these technologies. Most of us probably won't know the difference—actually, most of us will know the difference—but only because we're obsessing about it here.

IBM, partners in 32nm device surge [via tvg]

IBM announces new video games to teach business skills [gamingnexus]

Anything besides a single-threaded processor is going to be more difficult...it's the structures that are requiring people to do a lot more up-front planning...Whereas before, I wouldn't say [developers] were lazy, they didn't need to worry about that kind of structures...so there's some adjustment to that, and tools needed, to make that more efficient.

It is going to happen anyway. If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that's open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible.

"When the user comes into the world, the items are described as well as their positions," explained Colm O'Brien, one of the team of four researchers who worked on the project.

"There is also sound attached - for example, if there's a tree nearby you will hear a rustling of leaves," said Mr O'Brien.

The work also developed tools which uses text to speech software that reads out any chat from fellow avatars in the virtual world that appears in a text box.

Characters in the virtual world can have a "sonar" attached to them so that the user gets audible cues to alert them to when they are approaching, from which direction and how near they are.

While the initial research was conducted in Ireland by students brought together for 12 weeks to work on problems posed by more senior researchers, IBM promises that the concepts "will be passed on to IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Centre in Texas for further development."

Virtual worlds open up to blind [BBC News via Worlds In Motion]

The real reason why we're doing this is because we do feel the beginning of a major transformation on how people are going to interact on the Web — going from a flat to an immersive experience... It's not going to replace the two-dimensional Web but it's going to integrate and complement it.

For example the ability to bring together distributed groups of individuals - often who are on a volunteer or semi-volunteer basis - to be able to make more rapid decisions under conditions of uncertainty. To incorporate and use different sources of data and make decisions rapidly. To recognise people for their contribution. To be able to motivate.

Gamers 10,271 Stupid People 0

Gaming's business end [via maxconsole]

During the four-week Independent Activities Period course in January, students not only learned about the new microprocessor, they designed and implemented projects to run directly on PlayStation 3 consoles. The student team with the best project—a 3-D version of the classic pong game—later presented its work and discussed the experience at the Game Developer Conference in March.

The success has inspired MIT and IBM (with sponsorship from Sony) to offer the course again in 2008, which I can only assume is going to make getting into the computer lab that much harder. Kim Phu

MIT, IBM Team Up on First Playstation 3 Course [Physorg via Game News]

"As online environments increasingly incorporate aspects of virtual reality — including 3D graphics and lifelike, real-time interaction among many simultaneous users — companies of all types will need a computing platform that can handle a broad spectrum of demanding performance and security requirements," said Jim Stallings, general manager, IBM System z. "To serve this market, the Cell/B.E. processor is the perfect complement to the mainframe, the only server designed to handle millions of simultaneous users."

Pass the word down to your descendants, and make sure that they remember my warning as their protective dome is shattered by cruel, metal hands. I'd suggest a statue be erected in my honor, but the robots would just destroy it anyway. Michael Fahey

Cell Broadband Engine Project Aims to Supercharge IBM Mainframe for Virtual Worlds

IBM Collaboration With Brazilian Game Developer, Hoplon Infotainment, Looks to Hybrid Platform for Advanced 3D Simulations; Unique Mainframe Architecture Speeds Integration With Cell/B.E.

ARMONK, NY & FLORIANOPOLIS, BRAZIL - 26 Apr 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today disclosed a cross-company project to integrate the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) with the IBM mainframe for the purpose of creating a hybrid that is blazingly fast and powerful, with security features designed to handle a new generation of "virtual world" applications, such as the 3D Internet.

The project capitalizes on the mainframe's ability to accelerate work via "specialty processors," as well as its unique networking architecture, which enables the kind of ultra-fast communication needed to create virtual worlds with large numbers of simultaneous users sharing a single environment.

Drawing on IBM's research, software and hardware expertise, the project is being undertaken in cooperation with with Hoplon Infotainment, a Brazilian online game company whose software is a key component of testing the capabilities of the new environment.

"As online environments increasingly incorporate aspects of virtual reality — including 3D graphics and lifelike, real-time interaction among many simultaneous users — companies of all types will need a computing platform that can handle a broad spectrum of demanding performance and security requirements," said Jim Stallings, general manager, IBM System z. "To serve this market, the Cell/B.E. processor is the perfect complement to the mainframe, the only server designed to handle millions of simultaneous users."

At its heart, the project intends to create an environment that can seamlessly run demanding simulations — such as massive online virtual reality environments; 3D applications for mapping, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management; 3D virtual stores and meeting rooms; collaboration environments; and new types of data repositories. It plans to achieve this goal by parceling the workload between the mainframe and the Cell/B.E.

Cell/B.E. and Mainframe: A Beautiful Partnership

In the relationship between the mainframe and Cell/B.E. capabilities, Cell/B.E. will handle the complex simulation associated with operating in virtual worlds — for example, a ball thrown in a virtual reality world must obey the laws of gravity.

To that end, IBM and Hoplon are porting Hoplon software to the Cell/B.E. to handle message passing and physics simulation. The companies have already created a programming model and messaging architecture that separates the application running on the system.

For its part, the mainframe will run Hoplon's industry-specific middleware for virtual worlds, called bitVerse, currently under development using WebSphere XD as the underlying runtime environment, along with DB2.

In addition, the mainframe will run the administrative tasks for middleware and applications. It will also handle logistics (billing, etc.), and connectivity to third parties as well as to multiple clients, which might include PCs, game systems, mobile phones, music players, TVs, and other devices.

The Mainframe: It Contains Multitudes

Unique among servers, the mainframe was designed from the beginning to incorporate processors that handle a variety of specialized tasks. For example, so-called "specialty processors" are designed for processing eligible Linux, Java and data workloads as well as encrypting and decrypting certain data. In addition, the mainframe can include up to 336 RISC processors to assist I/O. It is anticipated that this powerful design point will help the system to integrate seamlessly with the Cell/B.E.

Just as important, the mainframe's Hipersockets technology provides fast communication between all the virtual servers contained in a single machine. As a result, it is believed the mainframe may be the ideal platform for large virtual worlds, which often require a technology platform that can handle many simultaneous transactions spread out among several hundred servers. The mainframe's Hipersockets enable users residing on different virtual servers to interact with each other with minimal lag time. By contrast, in a distributed environment, where many physical servers are connected by networking cables, lag time may be greater.

Other mainframe attributes — its leadership in security capabilities, for example — also lend themselves to virtual reality applications. In the security certification known as the Common Criteria's Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL), the IBM mainframe achieved one of the highest levels of certification — Level 5 — for logical partitioning, IBM's premier virtualization technology.

And it is able to handle massive workloads. For example, the mainframe recently achieved the world's largest core banking benchmark result delivering a record 9,445 business transactions per second (tps) in real-time based on more than 380 million accounts with three billion transaction histories.(1)

The revolutionary Cell/B.E. — jointly developed by IBM, Sony Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and Toshiba — is a breakthrough design featuring a central processing core based on IBM's industry-leading Power Architecture technology and eight synergistic processing elements (SPE). Cell/B.E. "supercharges" compute-intensive applications, offering fast performance for computer entertainment and handhelds, virtual reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows and other "image-hungry" computing environments. The groundbreaking Cell/B.E. processor appears in products such as SCE's PLAYSTATION 3 and Toshiba's Cell/B.E. Reference Set, a development tool for Cell/B.E. applications, as well as the IBM BladeCenter QS20. It is also embedded in custom Cell/B.E. based offerings from IBM Global Engineering Solutions.

Founded in 2000, Hoplon Infotainment is dedicated to multiplayer online games and complex simulations, as well as related online entertainment and business training ventures based on advanced information systems. Hoplon is located in Florianopolis, Brazil, and on the Web at http://www.hoplon.com.

Photo by Steve Richmond

Use virtual to learn about the real! Big Blue is planning to roll out a new program to teach employees "cultural values, decision-making regimens, and required technical skill sets." Here's the nitty-gritty:

The program was created as a means to accommodate thousands of geographically dispersed new employees who work or reside in remote areas that are significant distances from centralized IBM facilities... One of IBM@Play's chief goals is to take advantage of the internet and its ability to bring people together as a social network, thus breaking down the barriers of distance and satellite office environments.

Employees that reside in remote areas, learning how to social. Via Second Life? Furries and James Wagner Au aside, this actually sounds intriguing. Brian Ashcraft

IBM Teaches Employees How To Socialize With SL [Guardian]

The heart of the PLAYSTATION 3? A suped-up Cell processor developed by Toshiba, IBM and Sony. A single chip contains a main processor and eight sub-processors to unleash 200G Flops (floating point operations per second) of power. And now Toshiba plans to put that chip in mobile devices.

At the recent CEATEC show in Japan, the company showed off a more powerful, in development version of the chip with lower power consumption and increased performance. Says Mitsuo Saito, chief fellow at Toshiba's semiconductor company and one of the key creators of the chip:

Maybe other partners are going onto the very high-end. We are focusing on the low power area. One is for more mobile types of applications such as small games or some mobile phone-like systems.

Sony plans to look into other uses once the PLAYSTATION 3 has been launched. Yippie. Brian Ashcraft

PS3 Cell In Cell Phones [Digital World Tokyo]

We were almost going to make you guys stay up until midnight for this, but cooler heads prevailed. Anyway, according to the YouTube poster, this is actual footage of the Wii Broadway chip being produced. Not that I'd really be able to tell, one way or another: various earnest looking, bespectacled engineers in haz-mat suits wandering around the automated bowels of a huge, building-sized robot all look the same to me. But those more knowledgeable in the CPU engineering process might get a kick out of this. Florian Eckhardt