While the game market is exploding with the popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360-the target audience is generally thought of as limited to the teen and 20-something gaming crowd. Not if the game makers can have their way. The new consoles sport powerful microprocessors, advanced connectivity like HDMI and the latest blue laser disc players that open up a plethora of marketing opportunities-not just for the game crowd.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

Case in point is Sony’s PS3 with embedded Blu-ray disc player, HDMI connectivity and the new Cell microprocessor. Short for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture the chip was developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM’s STI Design center, and is optimized for multimedia and vector processing applications offering advanced (way advanced) media processing.

As early as 2005, Toshiba showed a system based on the Cell processor that decodes forty-eight (48) simultaneous MPEG-2 streams on a full HD (1920 x 1080) display, making it possible to fill the TV screen with thumbnail images of 48 channels and select ad hoc, the channel to watch. With this system, viewers move from "channel surfing" to eyeball surfing-err, scanning, of a single large screen with an all-at-once big picture view of what’s on your favorite channels.

This is all powered by a microprocessor (actually nine processors on a single chip) with a whopping 192 billion floating-point operations per second (192 gigaflops) and a unique 300-gigabit-per-second bus that represents a 36 fold increase over Sony’s PS2 "Emotion Engine." For details, see the Samual Moore article in Jan-06 issue of IEEE Spectrum.

For Microsoft’s part, its Xbox 360 is no less a microprocessing wonder that’s based on three processor cores of the 64-bit PowerPC vintage running at 3.2GHz. Their game system sports an HD-DVD peripheral and the recent "Elite" version supports 1080p with HDMI digital connectivity (finally).

With all this processing power, and in the case of both game consoles, the cheapest way to get an HD blue laser disc player, it’s no wonder that Sony is repositioning the PS3 as the centerpiece of a home theater system. In Japan, the company is urging volume retailers like Bic Camera, to move the game system along side flat-panel TVs and high end audio equipment.

What seems to be lacking are savvy software developers targeting niche applications to unleash the real power of these systems. Beyond games, few consumer applications can really take advantage of the parallel processing power that these new chips offer perhaps because the asymmetric chip architecture represents a big shift in how computers are programmed.

IEEE Spectrum quoted Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, saying, "How do you program with eight engines running full speed without them constantly stopping and waiting for data?" Perhaps recognizing this problem, in January, IBM partnered with MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to offer the first course in the US to explain the capabilities of the Cell Broadband Engine. The course, focused around introducing parallel programming to students, and included a contest to develop a software application. It was co-taught by Saman Amarasinghe, a professor at MIT and Dr. Rodric Rabbah of IBM.

So if we’re reading the tea leaves correctly, look to see a PS3 or Xbox based set-top box in your media center in the not too distant future. Oh, by the way, the winning software that came from students taking the MIT course …you guessed it-a 3D version of the game "Pong".