SCEI plans to use the technology in systems for the professional market, playing off the infrastructure in place to develop and fabricate CPUs and graphics chips for the Playstation2. "The most advanced semiconductor lines prepared for PS2 will also serve for the graphics processor," said Ken Kutaragi, president of SCEI.

SCEI plans to roll out its graphics systems in three phases. In the first phase, the company aims to develop a graphics processor whose performance is 10 times greater than the Playstation2. Two years after that the company plans to push performance to the 100x level. In the third phase a few years later, the company plans to raise performance to 1,000x the speed of today's Playstation2.

SCEI intends to use those systems as key nodes for broadband network services such as movie distribution and for the creation of computer graphics for movies.

The prototype, named GScube, is the first implementation for phase-one systems. SCEI intends to develop higher-powered chips for future systems.

As its name implies, GScube comes in a cube measuring 424 mm on a side. The cube consists of 16 sets of the EmotionEngine and Graphics Synthesizer, the two chips that power the Playstation2. Each set operates as a graphics-processing unit; the 16 units operate in parallel and a Pixel Manager merges the output of each.

The GScube's 128-bit EmotionEngine and Graphics Synthesizer with embedded DRAM are improved versions of the components used in the Playstation2.

The GScube's EmotionEngine uses 2 Gbytes of direct Rambus DRAM as main memory, while the Playstation2 has 32 Mbytes of RDRAM. The Graphics Synthesizer integrates a 32-Mbyte frame buffer memory on one chip, or eight times the 4 Mbytes of memory found on the Graphics Synthesizer of the Playstation2.

These chips will use a 0.18-micron process and will be fabricated at the same facilities that produce chips for the Playstation2. The EmotionEngine will be fabricated at Toshiba's Oita fab. The Graphics Synthesizer, which will be fabricated at Sony's Fab 1 in Nagasaki, enters volume production this month.

Although SCEI's original plan was to develop workstations, the GScube works not as a standalone workstation, but as a "visualizer," a rendering machine controlled by a host system.

"In the graphics creation community, various graphics workstations are already in use, but the rendering speed of those systems is a bottleneck for real-time video preview at full film resolution," said a spokesman for SCEI. "Creators have to play lower-quality pictures for real-time playback or have to take a much longer time than real-time to check their work because of machine-performance limitations. GScube's powerful processing capability will enable graphics creators to check their work in real-time in full resolution. We expect that such a system that connects to existing workstations will have a larger demand than one offered as a standalone graphics workstation," he said.

GScube's memory bus bandwidth is 50.3 Gbytes/second, and it has a floating-point performance of 97.5 gigaflops and 3-D CG geometric transformation of 1.04 gigapolygons/s. It has 512 Mbytes of video RAM and a VRAM bandwidth of 755 Gbytes/s. The pixel fill rate is 37.7 Gbytes/s and the polygon drawing rate is 1.2 gigapolygons/s.

The GScube outputs 60 frames at 1,920 x 1,080 resolution per second, which translates to a progressive scan rate of 60 frames per second. The top quality of HDTV formats is defined as 1,080p (progressive scan), but current HDTV broadcasts have only achieved an interlaced scan rate of 30 frames per second.

At Siggraph this week, SCEI demonstrated the system as a rendering machine that was connected to SGI's newly-announced Origin 3400 server.

SCEI intends to fine-tune the GScube to meet the needs of customers. It plans to introduce products this winter at the earliest.