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HardwareZone's 10th Anniversary Special

10 Years of CPU Progression - Part 4: The World not According to AMD and Intel

10 Years of CPU Progression - Part 4: The World not According to AMD and Intel

While we have kept most of our discussion to the x86 platform and the two major players left in the industry now, AMD and Intel, the microprocessor world is much broadly than just these two companies. However, we are also not going to digress too much into alternate platforms, though we'll be highlighting some of the important happenings in the past ten years.

First, IBM's PowerPC micro-architecture suffered the loss of a high profile name when Apple announced that it was shifting over to Intel's Core 2 processors. Ever since 1994, Apple's computers have been using PowerPC chips and while it may not be the largest of PC vendors, Apple does have a strong brand and image. This move was however quickly completed and by 2006, most of Apple's product lineup became Intel based. This was probably inevitable, given how IBM and Motorola, the main movers behind the PowerPC micro-architecture were facing manufacturing problems while the clock speed too seemed to have stagnated. IBM too was increasingly distracted by its business of making PowerPC variants for game consoles. Although the PowerPC micro-architecture is still relevant, it is now mostly found in embedded computers and high performance computing applications.

Meanwhile, what was distracting IBM is its own initiative with Sony and Toshiba to develop a new micro-architecture for the PlayStation 3. While based on the Power architecture, this new multi-core Cell processor is less a general purpose processor like existing x86 processors and more oriented towards the specialized parallel processing approach favored by graphics chipmakers like ATI and NVIDIA. Its main processing elements are eight Synergistic Processing Units that can execute threads in parallel and heavily optimized for single precision floating point computation, much like some of your graphics cards.

Besides its implementation in Sony's PlayStation 3 in 2006, both IBM and Toshiba have plans for the Cell processor in applications ranging from high-performance computing, mainframes and home entertainment devices. Currently, it is most well-known for its role in the PlayStation 3's impressive performance in distributed computing projects like Folding@Home.

 The Cell processor's most famous role is to power the PS3, currently the most powerful console in hardware capabilities.

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