Chimp Juice
07-02-2004, 06:08 AM
According to Pascal Mauberger, Chief Operating Officer of Soitec, IBM’s silicon-on-insulator (SOI) semiconductor technology will be used in both the Microsoft Xbox successor and Sony’s PlayStation 3.
"SOI is in Xbox through IBM. It is in the Sony PlayStation. And we will soon have three 300-mm wafer fabs producing SOI," Mauberger told Silicon Strategies. "IBM East Fishkill is running 90-nm SOI. Sony's Nagasaki plant is due online by the end of 2004," he added.
Soitec is a manufacturer and provider of SOI wafers. The silicon-on-insulator is an advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology that produces higher performing, lower power processors than traditional silicon techniques.
This SOI technique speeds the flow of electrons through transistors to increase performance and provides an insulating layer in the silicon that isolates transistors, decreasing this way the power consumption. The technology allows manufacturers to fabricate higher clocked processors while lowering the power demands of the components.
A real example of SOI is IBM’s Power Architecture microprocessors, found in Apple’s PowerMac G5 computers and in Xbox 2 alpha SDKs. While processors from Intel or AMD consume as much as 100W (you might have seen that big heatsink inside your PC), IBM's current PowerPC 970FX chip consumes about 50 watts in its 2.5GHz version. The previous PowerPC 970 processors, manufactured on a 130-nm process, required 66 watts at a lower clock speed.
They Are Everywhere…
There is one thing that Sony, Nintendo and now Microsoft have in common: IBM. The Big Blue, Sony, and Toshiba partnered in 2001 to develop the "Cell" technology that will power the PlayStation 3 among other consumer electronics. IBM also provides the Gecko processor used in the Nintendo GameCube and industry insiders have revealed that “Revolution” will also use an IBM processor.
Who is the last one to join the party? As TeamXbox revealed in a world exclusive, IBM is the technology partner Microsoft chose to build a state-of-the-art processor for the Xbox successor that is supposed to be a multi-core CPU, capable of processing six threads simultaneously. This processor might also be the first PowerPC built on a 65-nm process, as we informed in this previous story.
Since IBM is the pioneer in silicon-on-insulator technology, it is a no-brainer that all these processors will be built using SOI as well as other IBM’s technologies.
"SOI is in Xbox through IBM. It is in the Sony PlayStation. And we will soon have three 300-mm wafer fabs producing SOI," Mauberger told Silicon Strategies. "IBM East Fishkill is running 90-nm SOI. Sony's Nagasaki plant is due online by the end of 2004," he added.
Soitec is a manufacturer and provider of SOI wafers. The silicon-on-insulator is an advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology that produces higher performing, lower power processors than traditional silicon techniques.
This SOI technique speeds the flow of electrons through transistors to increase performance and provides an insulating layer in the silicon that isolates transistors, decreasing this way the power consumption. The technology allows manufacturers to fabricate higher clocked processors while lowering the power demands of the components.
A real example of SOI is IBM’s Power Architecture microprocessors, found in Apple’s PowerMac G5 computers and in Xbox 2 alpha SDKs. While processors from Intel or AMD consume as much as 100W (you might have seen that big heatsink inside your PC), IBM's current PowerPC 970FX chip consumes about 50 watts in its 2.5GHz version. The previous PowerPC 970 processors, manufactured on a 130-nm process, required 66 watts at a lower clock speed.
They Are Everywhere…
There is one thing that Sony, Nintendo and now Microsoft have in common: IBM. The Big Blue, Sony, and Toshiba partnered in 2001 to develop the "Cell" technology that will power the PlayStation 3 among other consumer electronics. IBM also provides the Gecko processor used in the Nintendo GameCube and industry insiders have revealed that “Revolution” will also use an IBM processor.
Who is the last one to join the party? As TeamXbox revealed in a world exclusive, IBM is the technology partner Microsoft chose to build a state-of-the-art processor for the Xbox successor that is supposed to be a multi-core CPU, capable of processing six threads simultaneously. This processor might also be the first PowerPC built on a 65-nm process, as we informed in this previous story.
Since IBM is the pioneer in silicon-on-insulator technology, it is a no-brainer that all these processors will be built using SOI as well as other IBM’s technologies.