A Cell of a chip
Key players weigh in
Lisa Su, vice president of technology development and alliances, STG, and
Jim Kahle, IBM Fellow and lead architect for Cell, STG, have been involved with the Cell project from day one. Here are their thoughts on some significant aspects of this announcement.
Project history
Lisa Su: We announced the Austin design center with Sony and Toshiba in March of 2001, and before that we spent about a year defining the architecture. It was unique in that we had the ability to start with a clean sheet of paper,
under the direction of both Ken Kutaragi of Sony and John Kelly of IBM. ISSCC marks the first time we are talking about the technical details of the project.
Can you give us a picture of what you contributed to design of the Cell processor?
I was the Lead Architect for Cell. I was the first manager putting together the Design Center, and created all the basic structures that the team would work together in. So, pretty much responsible for all the different aspects of the Design Center, the collaboration, and the technology we put together.
It was Jim Kahle's team, working under the direction of Ken Kutaragi and John Kelly. That's why Kahle (not Lisa Su) was part of Sony's E3 presser back in 2005 (timestamped at 13:00)...
Saying she worked on the CELL project isn't the same as saying she "made the cell", so...