Sony reportedly invests 1.6 billions to build a new fab for its upcoming "Cell" chip for the upcoming Playstation 2 game console. The "Cell" is said to be a thousand times more powerful than the processor in a Playstation 2. The new plant will be built in the Nagasaki Prefecture

The plant will use industry-leading circuitry widths of 65 nanometers, compared with the 90-nanometer widths found in today's most advanced chips. "Cell will be the basic processor for building networks," Ken Kutaragi, Sony's executive deputy president, told a news conference. "In addition to expanding its use in new applications inside the Sony group, we want to take it outside the home and expand it to a variety of areas."

The Cell is designed using multicore architecure in which a single chip may contain several stacked processor cores to boost performance. Toshiba, a partner in the development of Cell, also hinted that it aims to use the chip in next-generation consumer devices, possibly set-top boxes, digital broadcast decoders, high-definition TVs, hard-disk recorders and mobile phones.

Since early 2001, Sony Computer Entertainment, IBM and Toshiba have teamed to develop Cell, a new multimedia processor touted as a "supercomputer on a chip." Elements of its design are expected in future server chips from IBM.