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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
In all fairness, we really don't know from what processors the CPU in Xbox2 nor Cell will be derived from, but the most reliable information we have says that the Xbox2-CPU will we quite similar to PowerPC 970, but with three cores. As such it is indeed a PowerPC processor but it is also POWER4 derived. Cell on the other hand is stated to have a 64 bit Power core, and that's quite different from saying that it's POWER4 derived. IBM uses the term "Power" for both PowerPC- and POWER-processors, so it very well could be, and probably is, PowerPC-based and not POWER-based.
The core in Cell is probably an highly evolved PowerPC 440 based core since that is a quite proven, capable, lean and have a very modular design. I think it would be unwise to build Cell around a massively complex design like POWER4. It would suffer immensely from compelxity, power consumption and its monolithic design.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
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.
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.
The development kit for Xbox 2 is Windows NT4 for PPC with Xbox 2 extras.
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?
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In a free and open internet, who needs Windows
- Make one that works for all (or, at least, most) cases but is hideously complicated, or
- Make one that focusses on one class of application (e.g. throughput-oriented, realtime, etc).
Most monolithic kernels choose 1. Several micro-kernels implement the scheduling algorithms in user-space, allowing them to be swapped easily. Having a large number of cores available to the system would allow this to be dynamically tweaked.This approach seems more in line with the exokernel project than any microkernel I've looked at. If you've got some spare time, exokernel is well worth a look.
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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?
And how apulets are going to be extracted from serially executed code produced by a C compiler? Will the applications need to be written explicitely for Cell?
The idea behind the Cell processor is a good one...it is not entirely different than what the Transputer did 15 years ago. Transputer CPUs could be connected into a grid, and the processing power multiplied accordingly, but with one assumption:
code should have been written in a special programming language that allowed easy parallelization of code.
The idea of Transputers failed because it is highly difficult to extract parallelism from code. Special development tools were not available.
The PowerVR architecture also promised 'infinite' 3d graphics speed by just adding new GPUs, since it used tile rendering, but that failed, too.
85 degree C operation with heatsink
If the other stats you quoted were even remotely accurate, you'd have to add another zero to the end of that figure.
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.
The old UNIX SYSV kernel took a whopping 54kb of memory !. I'm now running the same kernel in user space and playing around with it.
Hehe, it's a fun project for CS Majors to play around with.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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.