The chip on display. (Reuters)London, Feb. 8: A microchip so powerful that it could turn mobile phones into pocket-sized desktop computers was unveiled yesterday by Sony, Toshiba and IBM.

Ten times faster than its rivals, the new Cell microprocessor is being billed as the world?s first ?super computer on a chip?.

A single Cell processor packs such a powerful punch that only three years ago it would have been rated as one of the top 500 super computers in the world.

The chips, which are initially intended for the computer games market, will appear in the new Sony Playstation 3 games console due out next year.

They are also expected to be used in new high definition televisions from Sony and Toshiba and be added to home and office computers soon after.

Yesterday?s announcement was one of the most eagerly anticipated in the electronics industry for years.

The Cell is expected to seriously challenge the dominance of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, the world?s leading producers of computer processors.

The three electronic giants, which have been working on the Cell technology at a laboratory in Austin, Texas, for three years, say it will bridge the gap between the cinema and video games ? allowing graphics and special effects designed for the cinema to be inserted directly into computer games.

Details of the chip were released at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Klaus Gottschalk, a senior IT architect at IBM, said the new chip was between 10 and 20 times faster than the best processors available today. He predicted that it would be widely used in electronics around the home.

?It is a super computer on a chip,? he said. ?In the beginning it will be targeted at the consumer electronics market ? for game consoles and home computers.?

?If it was embedded in a mobile phone, it would run everything that you have today on a personal computer,? he added.

The chip?s specifications have astonished computer experts. The size of a postage stamp, it contains 10 separate processing units, as compared to the normal one.

That allows the Cell to carry out 10 tasks simultaneously ? copying the ?grid? system of super computers. It runs at 4 GHz ? twice the speed of the Pentium 4 processor.

President of Sony Computer Entertainment Ken Kutaragi said: ?A new chapter in computer science is about to begin.?