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2004 MA XIM 13 UMPC
Cell Secrets
Revealed
Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and
is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.FAST FORWARD BY TOM R. HALFHILL
Quick Start
MARCH 2005 MA XIMUMPC 11
Hard Drive Capacity
Records Smashed
Hitachi announces a 500GB
Deskstar and a mini-microdriveW
e haven’t heard much from Hitachi
during the past year, with the excep-
tion of its record-breaking 400GB
Deskstar hard drive. Now that the 7K400’s
monstrous capacity has been matched by Seagate’s 400GB 7200.8 drive, and the
portable storage category is taking off like a rocket, the company is unleashing
an onslaught of new drives with the intent of reclaiming the capacity crown in
drives both large and small. Let’s take a closer look at Hitachi’s new offerings:Deskstar 7K500: The cream of Hitachi’s crop, this 500GB drive spins its platters
at 7200rpm and utilizes a five-platter design. It boasts a 16MB buffer and will be
the first drive to market to adopt the new SATA II features, which include the fol-
lowing: a doubling in available throughput, from 150MB/s to 300MB/s; Native
Command Queuing (NCQ), which, when paired with an NCQ-capable host
adapter, allows commands to be executed in the order deemed most efficient
based on the proximity of the read/write heads to the requested data; staggered
spin-up, to reduce the power draw when booting a multi-drive system; and
hot-swap capability. The 7K500 will
also feature a fluid dynamic bearing
spindle motor. Sounds tasty!
Deskstar T7K250: This 250GB drive
sports incredible area density thanks
to its two-platter design. It also sup-
ports NCQ and delivers 300MB/s of
bandwidth. It will also support the
SATA II features incorporated into
the 7K500.
Mikey: The all-new mini-micro-
drive—nicknamed Mikey—is both
smaller and thinner than its predecessor. The big news though is its record-
breaking 8GB to 10GB capacity, which is more than twice the capacity of
Seagate’s new 5GB ST1 drive and more than double the size of the current 4GB
Microdrive. This drive will certainly find its way into MP3 players and CE devices
in the coming year.Cuisine de PC
What these novel thumb drives lack
in capacity they clearly make up for
in “raw” performance. The 128MB
hand-made devices are available in a
variety of sushi types, including salmon,
red tuna, sea urchin, and even maki, making them a
must-have item for fans of seafood-based storage. $100, http://www.dynamism.comHitachi breaks the capacity
record once again with its
new 500GB 7K500 Deskstar.Fancy notebook cases scream out “steal me!”
so why not let people think your kick-ass
laptop is nothing more than day-old pizza?
The PowerPizza enclosure does just that,
concealing your notebook and thus keeping
it safe. The padded interior has room for a
power cable, mouse, Parmesan cheese, and
other accessories.
$24, http://www.humanbeans.net/powerpizzaA
fter more than four years of collaborative
development by engineers at IBM, Sony, and
Toshiba, the first technical details about the new
microprocessor destined for Sony’s eagerly awaited
PlayStation 3 are beginning to emerge. Code-
named Cell, this super-secret chip boasts a number
of innovative features destined to influence the
evolution of PC processors.
Public patents reveal a lot about Cell. The most
recent is U.S. 6,809,734 (57 pages long, plus 42
pages of figures). In addition, IBM is delivering five
technical papers about Cell at a semiconductor
conference in February.
From what we’ve been able to ascertain, Cell will
be a CPU architecture designed for multi-core parallel
processing, tight security, digital rights management
(DRM), and grid computing over broadband networks.
PC processors are already taking baby steps in these
directions, but Cell is making a giant leap forward. It
will be available in videogame consoles next year.
Even a low-end Cell chip might have eight
parallel-processing cores, plus another core as a
controller. Each parallel-processing core could have
eight function units. In contrast, the most powerful
PC processors in 2006 won’t have more than two
processor cores, with perhaps a dozen function units
between them. The Cell patents portend higher-end
chips with at least 64 processor cores and hundreds
of function units.
Cell implements strong security at the chip level.
Programs cannot freely access each other’s memory,
which will protect users against malware. But the
same security features can also enforce DRM. Cell
could prevent an unauthorized program from diverting
a media stream into a file, for instance, which would
foil today’s Internet radio recorders.
The Cell patents describe grid computing as a
standard feature. Today, grids are loose associations
of PCs sharing a task over a network. In the Cell
architecture, “software cells” are bundles of program
code, data, and metadata that can migrate in search
of execution resources. Software cells can circulate
among Cell processors on a single chip, among
multiple Cell chips within a system, or among many
Cell-based systems on a network—including the
Internet.
Cell is potentially much more than a videogame
chip. IBM wants to spread Cell across the broadest
possible range of devices, from cellphones to servers.
No CPU architecture has ever been suitable for
such a variety of systems. But then, no other CPU
architecture has had the features of Cell.It sounds like a brainteaser, but
the new Mikey drive is both smaller
and larger than its predecessor.