All Aboard!

An interesting article was published yesterday: Apple hires top IBM chip designer and blade server guru. Lately, there has been a good deal of speculation about the future of Apple's PASemi SoC. This article and the lawsuit will bring more attention to the subject. While it seems challenging under these circumstances and others that the PASemi Power Architecture based processors as licensed from IBM would ever be able to get to market, there is clearly a desire by Apple to assemble a first rate team around something new.

In the meanwhile, Power.org has become an industry joke.

Everything 'semiconductor' will depend on high level of efficiency and performance. As Apple has demonstrated, the choice of processor core may not matter as much as it once did. What matters is the complete offering - from the processing core inside a well designed, firmware supported end-user device to the software and network it seamlessly uses/shares with everybody else doing whatever, wherever.

We wonder if we will see some of the basic ideas discussed in US Patent #6,809,734 start popping up in related discussions soon. Patent #6,809,734 is the Cell processor patent. Remember, "CELL" is three things: CPU, packaging of the data and application, and the way it is moved across the network. Cell technology was conceived to be more than just the processor. The Cell technology was to be a combination of CPU design, network management and how the software was organized and transmitted in a cell (as in a package) of applications and data.

The idea was that if all computers and computing devices on the network were constructed from a common computing module then there would be a totally pervasive solution - everyone could get everything, everywhere. The objective was that this common computing module had a consistent structure and would employ the same instruction set architecture (ISA). This meant that the members of the network, e.g., clients, servers, PCs, mobile computers, game machines, PDAs, mobile phones, set top boxes, digital televisions and/or other devices, would use the same core computer processor logic insuring compatibility. The consistent modular structure would enable efficient, high speed processing of applications and data by the network's members and the rapid transmission of applications and data over the network.

The Cell Patent suggested a new programming model for transmitting data and applications over a network and for processing data and applications among the network's members (vs. data just being transferred between stand alone devices that must run the same application software to process and display the data sent). This programming model would employ a software cell that would be transmitted over the network for processing by any of the network's members (some to a higher degree and some to a lesser degree). Each software cell would have the same structure and contain both applications and data. As all computing resources on the network would have the same basic structure and employ the same ISA any particular resource performing the processing could be located anywhere on the network and dynamically assigned to the activity required.

Well, enough for today. Maybe, the ISA will matter. Maybe, there was a reason Apple selected the name Grand Central. Can you make the connection? Well, who knows!? Let's see what happens as the evolution continues...

Oh, and someone please get us a copy of those Court records as they become available. It should make for some interesting reading.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B