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The Mystery of Cell Processors
LucidBeast writes "Consumer appliances requiring more computing power Sony, IBM and Toshiba started 2001 developing "Cell"-processor that comprises of multiple processor cores and should give performance ten times of conventional processors. Now the CNN Money reports that details of the processor will be released Feb. 6-10 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Also reported by EE Times. Rumors also tell that Sonys PS3 development platform has already been shipped to some developers equipped with the cell processor."
details of the processor will be released Feb. 6-10
;-)
it gives a 10 times performance gain over a normal processor, from the year 2001 of course, which will be something like a 1.3 GHz P4 or a 800 MHz Celeron, both introduced in january 2001
These multi core and multi processor systems can be a bugger to program for because handling concurrrency in a way that doesnt cause deadlocking is a major pain in the ass.
One of the better ways is to model out the program in CSP (or a variant thereof) and then write in a specially designed language like Occam (developed for the original transputer, but ported now to x86). These give you code that cannot deadlock or livelock or suffer from resource starvation without needing any of the complex and buggy hacks you see in things like the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel only has to deal with a few processors... scalling to a few thousand processors in C would require a programmer of insane genius or the implimentation of effectivly a new language on top of C to handle the problems caused.
So, what language do developers use to target this? Is it something elegant designed for the problem at hand?
Beep beep.
With all that computing power, imagine how much of a benifit it would have to distributed computing projects such as Folding@Home, Seti@home, distributed.net,etc. Mind you, it would take re-writing a new client from scratch, but imagine how much of a benifit it could have! This will be depenedent though, on how quickly Operating Systems like Linux and Microsoft can adapt to this new processor.
Being the market leader and making good hardware are not necessarily the same thing. It's more marketing than anything. So I would say Sony has some expertise in marketing but I wouldn't say they make awesome hardware. It's expensive, it breaks frequently, it's hard to develop for. Maybe the PS3 will be better, but I would be very surprised.
I currently work at a game studio here in Melbourne Australia and we're looking at next gen stuff (currently we develop xbox, ps2, PC games). Anyway, today at a meeting, one of the senior developers told our group that 4 had been selected to go to a little show and tell by IBM/Sony in Melbourne, where some of the secrets of the "Cell" processor would be demonstrated/explained to the group. Apparently we were only able to get 4 spots at this event.
So I'm exicited looks like the tech in just around the corner and so are the multi-core platforms (like XBOX2 and PS3).... yay!
...the current computer architecture is nearing its limits yes, but it has no relationship to the content. A modern processor is very well capable of decoding HDTV content, probably encode too if you can accept less than super compression.
Of course, I see where it is going, I assume these Cell chips will be used to control hardware encoders/decoders with hard real-time limits (i.e. no frame skips and such crap). Taking the best of "dumb" hardware players of today, combined with the multitasking and flexibility of general computers.
But it is still a computer in drag. If anything, this seems more like a "retro" trend of the past, when you had active NICs/HDD controllers/whatnot with processors of their own. Now it is back with Cells instead. Just like terminals, we're coming full circle.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The article mentions that the Cell CPU will be included in a HDTV from the year 2006. Anyone know what such a powerful CPU is doing in a TV ?
I don't think that a game console needs such a so sophisticated and so powerful CPU, for important reasons:
-Real-time 3d graphics of cinematic quality will always be too slow for general purpose CPUs.
-developing a game with AI that needs ten times the power of todays CPUs will take many man years and may not be that welcomed by the console audience.
-It's very difficult to do multithreaded apps, and the difficulty rises exponentially with the number of threads.
So what exactly would the be role of the CELL processor in PS3?
It would make much more sense if:
-Sony developed a platform that can move insanely great amount of graphics around, with the ability to do real-time raytracing, rather than providing so much general-purpose processing power.
-Sony developed a graphics architecture that could really be parallelised, so instead of bringing out a totally new console, they could just up the graphics spec by adding more chips. They could save millions of dollars from developing and advertising the new console.
If this part reaches the promised performance, will CPUs then overtake GPUs for SIMD-type operations? Will a software implementation of OpenGL running on a Cell system top the performance of whatever NVidia and ATI are selling by then?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Question though: can program code written for the POWER CPU's be used on the new Cell CPU? Is there even the remote chance that MacOS X could be ported to run on the Cell CPU architecture in a pretty straightforward fashion?
The latter could be of great interest to Apple Computer because it means the potential for substantial increases in the performance of future Macintosh models.
This does not surprise me in the least. A Prescott processor has 125 million transistors, a Motorola 68000 had 68000 transistors. Yet the Prescott is not 1838 times more productive on a per clock-cycle basis. Admittedly, some of those Prescott transistors go to cache, superscalar magic, creating long fast pipes to achieve the GHz and implementing nifty MMX features. Even so, fabbing a 68k in 90 nm would create a tight little processor that is not 1800 times slower than the Prescott.
Thus, one can imagine creating a tighter core processor design with a budget of a million transistors each (15 times the original 68k budget) with a few million for L1 cache and another million for glue and then place 20 of them on a single die. Add optical interconnects and that new optical-to-silicon technology invented recently (for multiple channels of GHz I/O to feed all those cores) and you have yourself a powerful little processor.
The point is that with a budget of 125 million transistors, designers can do more than create a bloated single-core CISC processor.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Considering the companies involved, and the devices that they want to put the chip in, I'm really tempted to say that the Cell is nothing more than the biggest effort we've ever seen to get a DRM (trusted computing) CPU and associated parts on to the market. Obviously, this scares the bejesus out of me, since it would mean that these Cell devices would effectively be mod-proof; systems like Xbox Live already keep cheaters away, so this seems to be an attempt to stop modding alltogether. So, I have to ask: how is this going to benefit me, the consumer? If Live already gets rid of possible cheaters, how does stopping me from modding my box altogether help me?
If these assumptions are right, I don't like where this is going.
The cell processor is not ONLY for PS3. It's actually a very flexible system where the cores can assume different functionality depending on what is needed at that milisecond. For the PS3 most of the cells would be working on graphics most of the time. IBM is also planning on using the chips for workstations where presumably most of the cells would be working on MPU functionality most of the time.
I would not be surprised to see Apple use the chips if they get the OS ported to it.
So yes PS3 probably won't be all that powerful but variations of the chip will end up in IBM workstations and they will be very powerful.
evil is as evil does