DF dissects Sony’s patent application.
The PS3 blogosphere is alive with reports that PlayStation 3 is set to be beefed up with the release of a new Cell co-processor, based on a recently unearthed patent application located by FreePatentsOnline. However, such reports appear to be a combination of wishful thinking and a fanciful interpretation of the paperwork released by SCE.
The patent itself is pretty much self-explanatory: Sony is looking to protect the means by which it plans to interface multiple “mini-Cell” processors for potential workstations, home PCs – and yes – games consoles. In the example application given in the patent documentation, the CPU itself consists of a single PPU main processor, just like the PS3, but only has four SPUs – one of which is dedicated to encrypting and decrypting the traffic across the bus to the other “mini-Cells”.
The notion of multiple Cells working together in a distributed computing network is nothing new. In fact, it was one of the core philosophies of PlayStation architect Ken Kutaragi, and he discussed it at length during the run-up to the PS3’s launch. He envisaged a world where multiple Cell-based devices could talk to each other and create a giant super-computer network. This “new” patent simply seems to be a technical explanation of how, potentially, Cell-based systems could communicate with one another.