April 20^th, 2003 (12:00am) - The spring issue of the Electronics Design Chain magazine has a cover story that will give a terrible headache to PS2 fanboys and a happy Easter to the Xbox Hardware Team. Ken Kutaragi, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) has confirmed to the magazine that “The Cell” chip will not be the CPU powering the Playstation3, reportedly slated for release in 2005, because the chip won’t be ready until as late as 2007.

In 2001, Sony allied with IBM and Toshiba to create a cell-computing chip. These chips enable a distributed style of computing (known as cell computing) that performs computing tasks in much the same way a cell phone network routes calls from base station to base station.

The three companies will spend $400 million over five years to develop the new CPU, using IBM’s silicon-on-insulator process with IBM leading a design team of 400 engineers.

The Cell chip (rumored to be in the range of teraflops, roughly 100 times more powerful than today’s Pentium 4 chips) could have given the PlayStation 3 1,000 times the processing power of the PS2. This processing power was supposed to be used to build a multi purpose box capable of handle all sorts of simultaneous processing tasks; a home entertainment hub that will let you play games, surf the Internet, and use the device as a TiVo, all at the same time.

Now that the PS3 will not use the Cell chip, the CPU powering the PS2 successor will not be ahead of the Moore’s law, allowing the Xbox 2 to match the PS3 procesing power just by using standard technology available in 2005.

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