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Cell Workstations in 2005
yerdaddie writes "The cell processor will be introduced in graphics workstations before release in the Playstation 3, according to press releases by IBM and Sony. As previously discussed, IBM will be releasing more details in February 2005. However, apparently prototype workstations have already been "powered-on" and will be available in 2005. Since Windows on PPC was scrapped back in 1997, this leads to speculation that perhaps Linux, AIX, or BSD will be the operating system for cell workstations."
I may be wrong, but to me this sounds like hyper threading with a new name. Can anybody enlighten me?
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Actually it sound more like parallel processing to me, where many CPUs are connected together to form one larger CPU. Perhaps you can remover CPUs from the network while active?? Or maybe it is just easier to expand. Their page seems to be full of hype (in my opinion), but no description of concrete benefits from this technology. Also why is this in the games section ... seem more like hardware to me.
Philosophy.
XBOX2 is supposed to have Cell CPU(s) onboard. And obviously Windows is running on these.
This article provides some background.
Well, knowing IBM and Sony there is a great change that it will run linux.
At the moment it seems that linux is the choice for development on the PS2 and I think it will be with the PS3.
I wonder what the average speed of the processors would be? And if they'd include HyperThreading?
It has been stated before that the PlayStation 3 is expected to be capable of distributed processing due to the capabilities of the Cell architecture. Whether or not that will indeed be the case remains to be seen, it is certainly a lofty goal for the current market penetration (not to mention speeds) of broadband in the home. Does Sony expect these PS3s to cooperate with their Cell-based television sets?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
For all practical purposes, the PowerPC has been relegated to a Mac-only solution while high performance NT users have turned to Digital's Alpha....
This move puts Apple Computer in another awkward position: the company had been planning on using Windows NT in its Web servers.
And my favorite actual fact is that microsoft is going back to Power PC with the new Xbox . But Im sorry that Alpha has been erased from the map.
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
The graphic
Nothing to see here
The article says that each chip is running its own kernel. That seems like a lot of wasted energy to me. I agree that it could give a serious boost to performance. However what about the memory requirements (RAM specifically)? It sees to me that each micro-kernel is going to need some RAM of its own, and to get the promised performance you would need many of these micro-kernels. This technology may end up more limited by memory requirements than the speed of the chips.
Philosophy.
running a atandardised obtainable kernel(windows, linux, ect), with hardware level access after deencryption (if it's even encrypteD) and an exploit
.....
Am I the only one here thinking "bad fucking idea" or what? And lets not even mention the latency for distributed supercomputing applications. Everyone is now on wireless, unsecured, and sending signals all over the place. Hell, I should support that; free internet with the touch of a button after hijacking someone's toaster. w00t.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
The most interesting part, however, is that MS may be putting up .NET as the development environment for the X-Box 2. It makes sense that MS would try to leverage their gaming platform to lure developers onto the .NET platform and commit their engines to that API.
On another note, could Linux and Mono play much of a role in this if the Cell does indeed provide a Linux environment for development? If Sony is able to provide a less expensive development environment, development costs may ultimately go down and the consumer would benefit.
This could be either by the increase of choice since the bar of entry would be lowered for smaller software houses, or by cost if the games are indeed cheaper as a result; Existing engines and software could be ported or would be compatible, or due to the the ease of coding on a familiar platform.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
From one of TFAs: The Cell workstation is designed to deliver tremendous computational power, helping digital entertainment content creators generate higher quality content with richer and more dynamic scenes, much faster than current development systems.
This points at more than just game consoles. This looks like Sony is looking ahead to a future in which they can dispense with actors entirely and rely on realistic computer generated characters. Should be a good bit of money to be saved if you don't have to pay an actor millions to star in your film. Could be other applications too: Animated news announcers with features finely tuned to inspire trust in the viewer, human-like avatars in intelligent appliances, human-like answering machines and customer service line responders, etc.
So, how far are we from the footage ala William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and the "live" entertainment ala Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age?
Bureaucracy loves company.
Perhaps these micro kernels could be engineered to represent the processor collective as a single CPU that micro manages large tasks efficiently? If the micro kernels are engineered to JIT the code of a particular API (mono?) it could prove to be quite fast.
This is a diagram of the Cell architecture filed with the US patent office some time back.
You'd boot into something like Grub and choose your processor. That way you could run a UltraSPARC workstation, MIPS, Itanium, or something as small as a PIC. It'd be great for cross-platform development especially for embedded users.
I'm sure processor hobbyists would spring up to fill every niche of emulator. Probably be a great proving ground for design theory.
Considering the low heat output you could have a dual/quad-processor box.
Maybe someone would figure out how to run multiple translators at the same time so you could run x86 and PPC and 68K at damn-near native speeds
To me that'd be the ultimate workstation.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Im not quite sure what's the bug deal about the cell. It doesn't sound all that different to what we have now. A few proccesors and a couple of specialized processors for other things. What am i missing?
The more of these you have in your house, the faster the game/app you're playing/using will run as it will automatically use spare capacity on the other machines networked together in your house... I for one am most certainly looking forward to getting my hands dirty coding for these beauties... Bring on the Cell Processing Overlords... I'm ready.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
How is Windows on PPC even relevant?
IBM aren't big on windows anyway, or has the endless IBM/Linux advertising passed the world by?
I think we can be pretty confident the OS *won't* be Windows.
I'm still wondering about the real-time uses of this, i.e. PS3. Latency becomes a huge issue when you're trying to render a frame every 16ms.
While PPC support was dropped, if I recall correctly back in the Win NT 4.0 days, NT was amazing because it was designed from the ground up because it could basically be compiled for any endian chip/any aritecture.
Since it is the core of the current and future lines of windows, the windows base should be portable to a cell based system, basically it requires some new drivers and probably tweaking of the HAL abit. The problem is that all the applications (that we all consider part of the windows os but are really just applications running on top) would need to be redone.
Microsoft would have one of these machines in house by now for they're windows teams to work on supporting. That I have no doubt, what I do doubt if microsoft will consider this important/the future and if they'll support it during the inital release (w/ longhorn maybe?) or if they'll come late and lose a large section of the market as we all jump and have to use a *nix as the desktop.
If this whole cell thing is more then hype, and is the wave of the future, Microsoft will support it.
The same processor powering cell phone, PDA, gaming handhel device, gaming console and general porpose workstation can be a way out of porting-emulators hell which is handheld development is for now. However there will be different OS for handhelds still probably - for examle Nokia unlikely drop Symbian in favor of Linux...
Yeah I can see it now. New hot technology platform released with lightning fast speeds, and broad industry appeal. Yep, thats somthing Microsoft won't touch with a 6 foot long stick. Please... if Cell proves to be a useful and profitable platform, Microsoft will move in.
What'd I'd like to know is what IBM's solution to the software problem is. Software has always been the achilles heel of multiprocessor systems. Most existing programs and even most existing programmers can't use the resources efficiently. That's why we have gargantuan superscaler, out of order processors. Expensive in terms of hardware but it suits the software better.
So, why is Cell going to be easy to program, when other parallel systems aren't? The bits of that i've seen about the architecure suggests that programming might be an absolute bear.
Will it run Apple Mac OS X ?
Or whatever it's called then?
that the "graphics workstations" were indeed Power Macs.
AIX, Linux, BSD my ass. (assuming we don't count OSX as a bsd, which I suppose we should)
the Macintosh OS might be an easy port to to PPC...
I think IBM, Toshiba and Sony eventually will license and sell Cell technology to those who are interessted. One of the core ideas is that they want to spead this technology as far at they can since every Cell based machine tap on the computational power from all other Cell based appliances in its vicinity. The more the merrier!
Cell isn't one processor, it's a class of processors. The one that will go into the workstation is more powerful than one that will fit into a PDA, or a HDTV. I think that IBM will make one workstation, and Sony will make another. They will use different boxes and logos but they probably will use a common "Cell based" lable yet unseen, just like "Intel Inside".
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Skr1pt K1dd13: What, no Windows??
IBM+Sony+World+Dog: Windows is irrelevant.
The development kit for Xbox 2 is Windows NT4 for PPC with Xbox 2 extras.
Am I the only one who sees what a bad idea this is?
If you thought the n-gage was bad for side-talking, just imagine a keyboard and mouse dangling off of your cranium too.
In essence Cell is just that, but it doesn't stay there. Cell technology can distribute it's load to other Cell processosrs nearby. It's built from the ground up to use grid technology transparently. Quite revolutionairy.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
No. Cell processors are actually cheaper to produce than x86 based processors (less transistors and logic wasted on bandaid solutions like caches and deep pipelines). One of their strong points.
Computer components that talk by wireless..
;-)
That must be the wet dreams of NSA employees
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Cell workstations will be 8-way tipically, which many programs (like GCC) is able to use. If claims of Power5/Cell performance are true, it means that it will compile linux kernel under 5 sec. (8-way). All system, including KDE/GNOME and standard set of apps will take less then hour. Sounds too cool to be true.
839*929
There are rarely new ideas in computer architecture. This may be an update of a transputer-like thing with better communications and core cpu. The real questions that need answering are about the memory model (distributed?) and comm model (warmed over message-passing?).
Chances are it contains nothing new or radical
and is likely just a cluster component on a chip.
Prepare to be disappointed.
I'm still a bit worried that I've not heard much about the seemingly built-in DRM management of this new platform (that seem to be able to spread to all facets of technology, including toasters). According to a clause in the pressrelease by IBM and Sony from Nov. 29, the Cell processor will have:
- On-chip hardware in support of security system for intellectual property protection.
Is this the end of tampering-capable hardware (e.g. machines where you can modify the kernel, bypass DRM-systems etc) that some people have long foreseen? Anyone more in-the-meat of the technical details care to elaborate on this?
avocade.com
In a free and open internet, who needs Windows
As the processors getting more intensive in crunching numbers, heat is becoming a major problem. Would PS3 feature liquid cooling? Just a speculation.
Nothing's official just yet, but this is WAY more interesting than studying for finals, so here we go:
Processor instructions are broken into an 'apulet', which contains data as well as code to perform an operation. This is probably why its claimed that if more processing power is needed, then its a simple task to add a new workstation and the work can be offloaded.
A cursory read suggests that its like creating a cluster of highly efficient yet simple nodes.
Corrections are welcome.
Reference: EETimes
Windows development for PPC is most likely well on its way, as the next XBOX is PPC powered as wel. The development kit for the XBOX 2 games runs only on Apple G5 systems, and rumors state the next XBOX will be availeble in three versions, standart/with HDD etc/full PC, so it looks like Microsoft is supporting the PPC as a workstation processor as well. I'm quite exited to see what the next two years will bring
The article didn't mention anything about DRM. From the last reporting, the makers said they'll implement content protection. This "cell" is DRM.
The article mentioned this thing will be inexpensive, but what about electricity usage, heat, and fan noise? You have to pay more somewhere.
A CELL phone.
FPGAs can do what you're suggesting. Check out opencores for some examples of processor implementations already written. Assuming a large enough FPGA, you could implement any processor out there (and throw an Ethernet controller, VGA controller, etc onto the same chip).
That said, there's a huge performance difference between a real processor and a "soft" processor. The soft processors can't be clocked anywhere near as fast as an Intel/AMD chip. I think Xilinx is boasting a 200MHz Microblaze on their newest FPGAs.
It's a lot more advanced than that, the cores don't need to be on the same board, they can be seperated by a network connection.
It's system on a chip architecture and it's a lot more elegant than anything Intel or AMD will come up with, simply because it is free of x86 compatibility.
If I recall correctly, Sony Playstation 2 workstation (the one with the emotion engine) was over 15,000 USD. That puts it well beyond the "that would be interesting" price range and most likely beyond the aspiring game producer just out of college types.
Where, I would hope, a PCI-X based card could probably be priced much lower.
Now that I've said all of that, the old workstation would make an interesting addition to my collection...
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
a beowulf cluster .....
The POWER train seems to be in full motion. No more wondering why IBM is canning its x86 desktop crap.
I infer this means a full shift into Power based architecture from IBM, they will only retain x86 server products because customers may want them, but they will not play a large role in their roadmap.
And that could be a Very Good Thing. The Power architecture is superior to all x86 implementations, including AMD64, in every way. The sooner we can break out into full uncrippled 64 bit computing the better.
If the rest of us want Linux on commodity Cell hardware, we will have to hack the PS3. Game console mfgrs tend to try to prevent this from happening. Sony is also in the PC business. You would think they'd recognise the synergy in a combined product. Unless they're actually subsidizing the PS3 substantially with game sales.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
This seems like an excellent opportunity for Apple to license Mac OS X.
I'm assuming the intruction set for the cell processor is a superset of the existing PowerPC processors, or that the missing instructions could easily be emulated. If so that would make this is a graphics workstation that could run Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Shake, and other top notch professional software immediately. The existing user base wouldn't have to buy new versions -- their old versions would run.
As discussed many times on slashdot and elsewhere, Apple won't license their OS unless they believe they can do it without cannibalizing their existing user base. Doubtless there would be some cannibalization of the high end, but if it makes OS X the clear platform for high-end graphics workstations it could still be an overall boost to Apple. I don't really know how the current high-end graphics market sees OS X. My impression is that a surprising amount of it is on Windows, and that Apple is just holding on to its market share in this area.
Anyone with more current knowledge of the high-end graphics market care to comment?
It's their, not they're.
Once you understand what a contraction is, the rest falls into place. They're = they are... which of course doesn't fit your sentence.
if there were cell-based desktop... Running, for instance, linux... Could we play ps3 games on it ? This could cause an big boost to linux's growth ...
ever heard of soemthing called "yield"?
Wife: Honey, can you turn down the TV volume, you're stealing too much processing from the microwave and my chicken wont bake nicely.
Husband (sniggers): Yah, as if it'll make it taste better
Carpe Diem: Seize The Day!
It is being used to program games for the XBOX next, via dual G5 machines from Apple. I doubt the games are programmed on MacosX,plus, more than one source seems to agree...
Too bad 3M didn't get involved.
Then it would have been the STIM Cell processor.
A custom X-Box 2 running NT, or a Mac running NT.
Unless there's aother PPC at the workstation level?
isn't the ps3 gonna be back compatible with the ps2 and ps1. if so the cell would run on a mips r3000
instruction set and not a ppc instruction set.
any one knowing anything about this????.....
Time to move to Canada.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Technological Features for "first-generation" Cell chips:
4.6Ghz Clock Speed
1.3V operation
85 degree C operation with heatsink
6.4Gb/s off chip communication
from the article:
eight cores on a single chip
90nm SOI process
Link to Powerpoint
Link to Original Article in Japanese
By chosing from 2 threads instead of one it has greater chances of finding an instruction that can be computed by an idle (at that time) unit
If the computer has, say, 100 K or 1 M cells running at low power levels, it can still compute a difficult sequential problem with a speculative approach much like the hyperthreading scaled up to the stratosphere. Variables that take a long time to compute can still be assigned speculative values and used to compute further. Then when the values of the variables are definitively obtained, the results based on incorrect speculative assignment are discarded while the results based on correct assignment are retained.
Analogies to this approach occur readily in theorem proving. Fermat's last theorem was shown to be equivalent to a number of conjectures. A fully sequential approach would have to prove the conjecture before proving the equivalence while a speculative approach allows the proof of the equivalence before the proof of the conjecture.
The analogy breaks down in that the conjectures had to be equivalent to Fermat's last theorem rather than a larger set of assertions with unknown equivalence. Another analogy is one might have used Fermat's last theorem speculatively before it was proved, to derive results that would be accepted only after Fermat's last theorem was verified.
Willy nilly speculation would waste a lot of processing time (but so many computers are devoted to nothing but speculation anyway). There are two coordinates - time and space. The speed of light constrains time, but space might be used to obtain results faster than pure sequential computing.
Speculation on major variables that have only a few possible values is practical - a lot better than speculating on a large set of variables that imply an exponential number of speculations.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Over 20 years ago InMos invented the transputer, a high-performance CPU with 4 high-speed on-chip channels. They invented OCCAM, a language optimized for parallel processing, just for it. It went approximately nowhere, at enormous expense.
OTOH, with Sony and IBM behind it, this one is bound to at least get embedded a lot. I don't see much future for it beyond that.
NHA
"Hofstee said Cell taps into an emerging "convergence between what we think of as supercomputing and what we use in the entertainment space"
So your tv will be a supercomputer? Could you rent out time to places like nuclear weapons labs?
"This looks like Sony is looking ahead to a future in which they can dispense with actors entirely and rely on realistic computer generated characters. Should be a good bit of money to be saved if you don't have to pay an actor millions to star in your film."
...and I'm not *envy*envy*). What's never pointed out (aside from how capitalism works) is all the years of scrapping by on minimumn wage, and rejection all the while honing your craft (note that actors doing it for love is bad. Programmers doing it for love is good), competing with a million others who all have the same dream (guess some "not doing it for the love" leaked over from IT).
Well, I can see the hate runs deep. Has anyone here actually tried acting? Do they know what's involved in becoming an actor? How about what an actor is? Nope? Didn't think so. Just shows what happens when your worldview comes from the likes of Entertainment Tonight. Oh lookie, he's being paid millions (*silently said*
Anyway there are those who've earned their place as far as being an actor. Just because so and so "I have an opinion" doesn't like that actor doesn't mean there's any defect in the actor. Just as some people may like celtic music, while other like big band, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with either the music, or the artists.
So to conclude, actors and actresses aren't going to go away, no matter how much you may wish it. Their skill may be hidden behind a skin (polar express), but it's still there, and that's what people want and are paying for (millions even. Get's your goat doesn't it?).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
According to
m l
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/34994.html
longhorn is not going to run on the cell chip:
"Microsoft's software can't take x86 beyond some minor hyperthreading on two cores without major reworking -- and Itanium simply doesn't cut it. The Wintel oligopoly could spring a surprise -- a multicore CPU made up from the Risc-like core at Xeon's heart, along with a completely rewritten Longhorn kernel to use it. But no one has reported them stuffing this rabbit into their hat. So, for now at least, they seem pretty much dead ended."
This article predicts that the cell chip will replace x86 as the main platform for Linux.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/34707.ht
Each processor runs it's own kernel. I think you better think of a real micro kernel. And the features called where the instuctions are close to the data sounds more like some kind of message passing kernel like the mach-kernel.
It would not be a problem to run a GNU/Linux kernel on top of that.
But forget the 1 memory - x processors pardigma. That is not needed for a system like this and would only creat a bottleneck.
I want a "cell workstation" that's a mobile phone with UXGA display (HMD? Hologram? Neural interface?), voice recognition and 1.5Mbps Net connection. Why must IBM bait and switch me with this deskbound processor terminology? At least they could roll out a WiFi microfluidics DNA nP.
--
make install -not war
You make some very interesting points. I would also like to add that the XBox 2 development kit is a PowerMac G5 (PPC970fx) with Windows (NT?) running on it.
With Microsoft choosing PPC processors for it's XBox 2, and Sony choosing PPC for a new class of workstation, things don't seem quite as rosey for the x86 architecture as they used to.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
>It does sound vaguely convincing if you know
>nothing about chip design and production processes.
>To anyone else, it screams BULLSHIT!!
>I won't bother looking at the Japanese slides to
>work out if you're trolling or if you have been
>trolled. I'm sure other people can do that.
You fool, the silde is in English and official of IEEE ISSCC.
We can finally make Orac.
ever heard of soemthing called "relevance"?
I'm not a big windows fan. Nevertheless, what I do know about the architecture of Windows NT (yes, that includes 2k and XP - they're just newer versions of NT for all the marketing hype) suggests that porting it to a new architecture should not be that different from porting, say, Darwin.
0. We presume there's already a toolchain available to generate binaries from C.
1. Write a new HAL. The HAL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer at the bottom of the NT kernel. It is the interface to a bunch of very low level services, like memory management and basic I/O. Probably more things I can't think of right now. It's important, but relatively straightforward.
2. If this new machine doesn't, more or less, have a PCI bus for most of the major peripherals, then there will be a bunch of driver work at this point.
3. I wave my hands here, as I do not know all of the details of booting NT. You need to load the HAL and the kernel. I am not sure when control is handed to the kernel to load the rest of the drivers from the boot media. But the boot procedure will need to at least load the HAL, the kernel and at least a few drivers. If the new machine uses OpenFirmware, then this will likely involve a primitive NTFS filesystem reader in FORTH. Such a thing may, in fact, already exist.
4. Compile the source. Presuming the machine is either LP64 or ILP32, there ought not to be any real difficulties, depending on how together Microsoft has their shit. They've been down those two roads already. I am less sure about endian issues.
5. ??? (usually involves violations of anti-trust laws)
6. Profit!
Extending it to 64-bits may be against the licensing agreement that they have with ARM. Or if it wasn't, they may have to turn that IP over to ARM at a later date. I don't think this will ever happen.
2. Alpha reborn. Less likely but it is know to scale well to high speed and smp. Could the Alpha scale down to PDA level?
I love the Alpha architecture. It is a very clean RISC architecture. However, instruction density is a little low.
3. Forget RISC. Maybe RISC is not the way to go after all. The difference between memory speed and cpu speed is increasing. I code density the key to higher speed in this day and age. Should we think about super CISC where each instruction does more?
Ding, ding ding! We have a winner. Both Alpha and ARM (XScale) are RISC architectures. Itanium, Alpha, PPC, and (to a much lesser extent) ARM, have instruction density problems (they require larger instruction caches to get the same effenciency as an x86 chip). This problem only gets worse when CPU core speed keeps increasing at a faster rate than memory speed.
Even x86-64 has its problems. For a long time the x86 arch was seen to be register starved. When AMD release the x86-64 arch, it doubled the number of integer and SSE registers. However, to make use of the extra registers, you needed to add a byte to every instruction. This, combined with doubled pointer sizes, meant that many 64-bit programs run slower than 32-bit versions (especially if the compiler couldn't use the extra registers effectively). This is less of a problem with the Opteron due to it's integrated memory controller.
Anyway, the main reason I replied was because you simultaneously advise going for Alpha and super CISC. These are completely opposite directions. The RISC / CISC wars are funny. CISC was used to keep programs small (no space to store them). RISC pulled ahead when hard drives and memory was cheaper. CISC is taking the lead now because HW is sufficiently fast to decode it, and memory bandwidth into the processor is severely constrained. I don't see the trend reversing again any time soon (especially with multi-core architectures sharing memory bandwidth).
Dan
Requirements:
Playstation 3
Internet Access
One or more Cell-based products including:
Toaster
Fridge
Stove
Ever hear of something called "logic"?
The statement was that cell chips will cost more. The rebuttal was that they were cheaper to make. The rebuttal to that was about yield.
You asked about the relevance of "yield".
yield: A profit obtained from an investment; a return.
So, yield is relevant because for the companies that are investing in this product to get a high yield, they will have to sell at a high price. And that is highly relevant.
- Just so we are clear, Power4 is a PowerPC chip
Eh, wrong.- I'm not sure exactly what distinction you are making...
Distinction:POWER4 is a POWER chip, with the full POWER ISA, running on an IBM bus. As are POWER, POWER2, POWER3 and POWER5.
ALL PowerPCs (601, 603/e, 604/e, 750/g3, 7400/750FX/7450/g4, 970/g5) include only (diffrent) subsets/supersets of the POWER ISA. Also, they use a Motorola bus.
In conclusion, wrong.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
I don't know that "The Cell" is the answer, but this kind of distributed CPU load has been a long time coming. Sitting at an ad agency watching eight dual G5 PowerMacs sit idle while two more slug through some Photoshop work makes it really apparent that what IBM / Sony are trying to accomplish is much needed.
Kick it up to a higher level, a 5,000 user corporation, and you could replace million dollar server farms with Cell workstations.
And the home appliances market could be super cool - the more Cells you have, the faster your pr0n server can comb through your nightly batch downloads (:
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Instead of programming for a bunch of specialized CPUs (each with their own strengths and weaknesses), all the processors are the same. Even better, depending on how the OS works, you might not have to think about separate processors at all! Best case, the programmer just sees a single pool of available processing power.
The big advantage for hardware developers is that instead of spending $$$ to make the GPU fast enough to handle all the polygons of a graphic intensive game, the audio processor fast enough to handle a sound intensive game, and the "Emotion Engine" fast enough to handle an AI intensive game you just add as many Cell CPUs as you can and let the developer figure out how they want to use that power.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
They are better known as 'cubicles'
Okay, first off, the bus isn't really germaine to a discussion of the architecture. Further, what bus do PPC's like the 440 series use? Hint, Motorola didn't design it. 486's and Pentiums are the same architecture but they use a different bus...
h tmlc /
s g/ 2a09c59094e16205
Second, while the wikipedia article is interesting, I'd like to refer you to
http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/power/about.
https://www-03.ibm.com/chips/products/powerp
I think they have some familiarity with the subject. The first URL lists a bunch of PowerPC documents under "Power Architecture resources"
From the second URL, the quote, "As members of the IBM Power family of products that power everything from handhelds to mainframes, enterprise class servers to video game consoles, IBM PowerPC products deliver high performance, power optimization, and excellent value."
So, IBM sure seems to think that PowerPC stuff is a member of the POWER family. You better let them know that they goofed up.
Now, just to make things perfectly clear:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.arch/m
(hopefully deep linking is working right on the new groups - that should be a post by Mr. McCalpin himself from Oct 19 2002)
To quote : "POWER4 is an implementation of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture.
PowerPC 970 is an implementation of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture."
He worked on the POWER4, so I'd trust him.
twit.
that's how they promise to cut power use and heat by 80%. No more cycles - everything will be asynchronous. And not a moment too soon.
And it's rather amusing to think that Microsoft had NT ported to a 64bit processor a long time prior to the introduction of the Opteron.
They never did port MS-Windows to 64-bit alpha; it only ran in 32-bit mode. Compaq was involved in the 64-bit port, but announced in 1999 that it was foregoing 64-bit development in favor of IA64.
Dave Cutler *did* get some early versions of 64-bit Win2k to boot on an AlphaServer, but since Compaq lost interest in developing Win2k for the Alpha (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions), MS decided to pull the plug on Win2k for alpha entirely.
This was right at the time (late fall of 1999) that Intel sent out the first of the Itanium chips.
Anyway, MS never did finish development on a 64-bit version of MS-Windows on Alpha.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I think Sony probably feels vindicated by the success of the Playstation2 and its wacky architecture that, lets face it, is probably contributing to untold man-centuries of additional work than if the xbox or GameCube had won the console wars. Of course since everyone spent all this time learning how to do all the l33t PS2 tricks everybody spits on the Xbox as being for wimps...
While the idea of coding an entire project in little streaming modules that run on a zillion little processors is certainly academically interesting, if we won't be allowed to run our "main logic" code on some kind of CPU with more than 128K of addressable memory, that will be a huge barrier to entry, and could put Sony at a huge disadvantage compared to more conventional consoles. At least with the PS2 you could run most of your code on a fairly normal CPU and just focus on putting the graphics pipeline on the vector units, and maybe a few other things as needed, which is a lot of "bang for the buck", plus it lets you maintain a clean, multi-platform structure.
Well, here's hoping that at least the APUs will have such "frivolous" features such as integer multiply and hopefully a C compiler... also, if the guys who wrote the rather bloated IOP "operating system" code are involved with this project, that could be nasty... at least with the PS2 you could go straight to the metal and not have to care too much that nobody at SCEI seems to know how to write proper code...
Since Windows on PPC was scrapped back in 1997, this leads to speculation that perhaps Linux, AIX, or BSD will be the operating system for cell workstations."
My guess is OS X.
MORTAR COMBAT!
You're close but you got one thing wrong. PPC601 implements the full POWER instruction set from its day. Every PowerPC processor since then has been missing some functionality (usually instructions) present in POWER.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Don't bastardize a spaceballs quote and try to pass it off as your own!!!
Fundamental misunderstanding re: subsets.
POWER4 is a POWER implementation of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture. This includes QoS/Multi-Core/Hardware-level Virtualization (e.g. ISA extension), etc. All the things that make it an Enterprise-level processor.
PowerPC 970 is a PowerPC implementation of the 64-bit PowerPC architecture. This includes single core/no virtualizations/much faster core timings and most importantly, the ability to run 32-bit PowerPC binaries concurrently with 64-bit PowerPC binaries. All the things that make it a desktop/workstation processor.
That IBM has re-named the POWER architecture PowerPC, does NOT mean that PowerPC==POWER. What it means is that both PowerPC and POWER are PowerPC [Architecture].
A tree is a plant.
A blade of grass is a plant.
Both are implementations of the plant architecture. Now, rename plant, blade of grass.
A tree is not a plant.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Typo.
A tree is not a blade of grass.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
I suppose we should probably blame IBM for causing some confusion. I won't admit that I'm incorrect, but I'm not sure I have a leg to stand on trying to call you incorrect either. IBM marketing calls the high end stuff "POWER" so there is indeed a distinction, it just isn't officially spedified in a manual.