The PowerXCell 8i will drive the Road Runner system now under test at Los Alamos National Labs to see if it can become the world's first supercomputer to deliver sustained petaflops performance. Besides cracking the petaflops barrier, IBM hopes hundreds of users will decide to plug into their IBM servers a two-socket board housing the new Cell chips to deliver what IBM calls "supercomputing for the masses."

The new chip uses 65nm process technology to reduce the power consumption of the previous 90nm chip while maintaining the same 3.2 GHz frequency. That allows IBM to get two of the chips on to a single board while keeping board-level power consumption under 250 W required by IBM's BladeCenter servers.

The new design now supports mainstream DDR-2 memory rather than the Rambus XDR memories used in the original Cell. It has also expanded total memory capacity of the chip from 2 to 32 Gbytes to support large data sets required in many high-end technical computing applications.

IBM also expanded support for double precision floating point on the eight specialty cores used on Cell. The chip now delivers up to 190 TFlops of double precision floating point performance, five times its previous level, said Jim Comfort, vice president of workload optimized systems in IBM's Systems and Technology Group.

In addition, IBM expanded the programming tools and management software to let its BladeCenter systems more easily support servers using both Power or X86 processors along with Cell-based cards. With the tools, users can call a library function to invoke vector processing capabilities of the Cell.

"For example, you can use our API to send Monte Carlo functions to the Cell" without disrupting existing x86 or Power code, said Comfort.

The so-called QS22 adapter card will be available at the end of the month for $9,995. IBM is aiming the cards at seven core markets in real-time analytics and digital media.

"We think the total available market is quite large approaching $8-10 billion," said Comfort.