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Cell Workstations in 2005

Posted by michael on from the it-slices-it-dices dept.

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."

3 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Memory Requirments by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Memory Requirments by nacturation · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      Keeping in mind that there are various distros which fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk *with* userland utilities, I don't think the size of the kernel will prove to be the limiting factor on a modern workstation.

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  2. Re:Ultimate workstation... by Steveftoth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You do realize that the whole reason that Transmeta's processor works well at all is because it's hopelessly optimized for emulating x86 instructions. And their software took years to write and it still is not 100% correct. (they still have some bugs in the x86 emulation) It's not going to be easy to do such a thing and at the end of the day what would be the advantage of running emulation at that level when you can just run a user level process to emulate a PIC, or ultrasparc or whatever you want?

    I don't see the point of being able to boot into a random chip because you also have to emulate the entire computer, not just the cpu.

    Even if you could emulate an ultrasparc cpu, you can't just throw it into a PC case and boot solaris, you have to use an actual SUN computer that has the right video, network and ide cards in it otherwise you'll have a broken machine. There are lots of little things that will cause the machine to break. The cpu is the heart of a computer, but it's not the only piece. They all have to fit together or it won't work. Just like you can't go and install a copy of OSX on a motherboard for the MorphOS (you can, but it's through an emulation layer, Mac on Linux) It's not at the kernel level.