Sony and IBM finally gave out some details today in San Francisco about their forthcoming "Cell" processor chip, and the results for Java should be stunning.

There's a very good article about it here. They describe it as "one 64-bit Power PC processor core and eight separate processing cores that the companies call 'synergistic processing elements'". While I initially dismissed these as eight FPUs targeted toward massive rendering on the Playstation 3 that it was primarily designed for, further inspection causes me to believe that these SPEs are actually much more like the Transmeta Crusoe chip, which contains something they called "code morphing". This is basically a process where instruction words for a target processor are just-in-time compiled for the native instruction set. I owned a Toshiba laptop that was based on this chip. It was a great laptop for a non-developer.

In the release, they point out that the SPEs could each run a different operating system, and if I'm right about the architecture, it should be no problem to run different operating systems that were designed for different instruction sets.

Where this gets really exciting is when the instruction set just happens to be that of the Java Virtual Machine. Now, we effectively have Java hardware processing, and with eight of them available, there will be plenty of power available for multiple threads to run in parallel (and at hardware speeds!)

It just keeps going though. If the article is to be taken at face value, this processor can run at 4.5GHz in the lab. When I was on the original PPC project at Apple, I remember the 601 arriving from IBM, and pretty much working flawlessly thereafter. IBM truly understands massively parallel architectures, evidenced by the fact that their Power3 chips are at the heart of the world's fastest machines today.

But with all this power, the chip is supposed to consume only 30 watts of power. Given that some of the Pentium 4 chips are in the 120 watt range, this is simply amazing. In real terms, this means less fans and a quieter machine, or an easier time using more of these chips, depending on your perspective.

So what will all this cost? One of the truly great things about this chip is it's being used in the PlayStation 3. Because of this, a bazillion of these chips are going to have to be produced at reasonable prices, since game consoles don't thrive without a lot of machines in the field, and the entire console usually sells for less than a garden variety AMD64 chip does today.

Wow!

I was really tempted to replace my AMD64 desktop with a G5 dualie, and given that Cell desktops are still a couple of years away, I'm more inclined to switch architectures back over to PPC than ever. Why now? Because I know that the software I buy today will be usable tomorrow, and that the PPC architecture is a long way from abandoned. Apple has really shown their commitment to OS-X and this chip is going to be an incredible thing. No sense in waiting, really!