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."

Comments

I may be wrong...

[wcitechnologies]

I may be wrong, but to me this sounds like hyper threading with a new name. Can anybody enlighten me?

Maybe...

[Spruitje]

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.

If this really _DOES_ come out,

[9-bits.tk]

then we probably would be seeing Linux for Cell or similar. Reading that reminds me of the XBOX-Linux and the GameCube Linux projects.

I wonder what the average speed of the processors would be? And if they'd include HyperThreading?

Distributed Processing

[Halcyon-X]

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?

Re:Distributed Processing

[badboy_tw2002]

Do people actually believe this (tr)hype? Were you the same people actually getting giddy about the awfully named "Emotion Engine" allowing realistic hair or somehow providing better human reactions to characters in 1999?

Console games work and develop well because of one thing: standardization of platform. If you put your game in any console of the same type, it will run the same (besides various regional differences (PAL, NTSC) and maybe some hardware changes later on in a production run, ala XBox's two DVD drives)

You do not design for "potential extra processing" from someone's TV, toaster, aibo, or whatever. You design for the LCD, which is the unit that everyone buys. You might be able to take advantage of extra hardware like voice headsets or harddrives, but even then your game has to work well without it. (Example: Xbox allows you to precache data from the DVD on the harddrive, but you still need to be able to meet loading time standards without it. i.e. you can do better than 15 seconds with the harddrive, but no worse than without).

Can you imagine the testing nightmare of "better AI" if someone has a Sony DVD player nearby? Do you test every level with every combination of chip configuration out there?

This of course has been written with the thought that this is at all possible. Well, sorry, it isn't, and the super IBM cell processor isn't going to make it so. Console games work off extremely hard deadlines, and that's the refresh rate on your TV. Every 16 or 32 ms you need to have a new frame rendered and ready to go. You can't schedule a few frames for processing on the microwave and ask for them back whenever. What your drawing depends on the real state of user input, ai, physics, lighting, scripted events, etc. The state of the game at any point in the future is unknown, and thus in those 16 ms you have to figure out what needs to be updated, how the world should change, and finally render that to the screen. The actual rendering time might not even be half of the time you have for a frame. Do you have the bandwidth to send that data out and expect it back in the same frame? If so let me know so I can get some of that!

I could see remote AI processing, MAYBE, but that still has to be able to be done on the console anyways for the LCD case. AI is one of the worst things to debug in game development as a lot of times it can be non-deterministic. You do not want to throw another variable into the testing, especially not when its hardware.

Sony has a very good marketing department for continuing to push this crap. They've said "we will use this cell technology in other products besides the PS2" and "In the future the PS platform will interact with other Sony brand components", thus meaning that maybe your PS2 can start popping popcorn or something, but that has nothing to do with processing, its just networking. But somehow the two get combined on fan sites to mean "OMG, buy 28 PS3s and Jaxter and Dax runs at 6000FPS!!!"

What you will see with cell processing is a continuation of the mulitprocessor platform the PS2 had, but in a more generic sense. This should allow very interesting stuff to be done, and while games will be initially harder to develop, there's going to be some really cool stuff coming out of this. But don't believe you're going to suddenly see a sentient household that's drawing a few extra pixels in GTA VI: The Quest for More Money.

my favorite quotes

[mxpengin]

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.

Platform showdown?

[Halcyon-X]

What's interesting is that how Sony and Microsoft handle their product launches may have an impact on the amount of games we see for these systems. With Linux gaining ground on the desktop (bear with me here), it is concievable that it might be a larger target for games, if not gaming development on a 64-bit workstation. Epic have already committed to an Unreal Tournament development platform on Linux (Windows 64-bit taking its time is probably also a factor).

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.

Effects on the future of entertainment

[hussar]

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?

Ultimate workstation...

[CaptainPinko]

I've always wondered this --I mean it's so obvious that since it's not done it must mean it's flawed-- why doesn't Transmeta release a mobo with it's chip and a blank code for emulating the processor. Hobbyists emerge and write multiple emulator.

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.

Re:XBOX2 + Cell = Windows

[Henriok]

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.

Real-time applications

[DCstewieG]

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.

Windows

[MustEatYemen]

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.

Windows for Power exists

[dan_sylveste]

The development kit for Xbox 2 is Windows NT4 for PPC with Xbox 2 extras.

On-chip DRM worries

[avocade]

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?

Re:Memory Requirments

[TheRaven64]

From what I've read about the Cell line, each core can run its own kernel (i.e. it doesn't have to). This provides some interesting possibilities, for example a general purpose kernel running on one, while a real-time kernel runs on another and handles things like sound. Current systems have to make a choice when it comes to scheduling algorithms:

1. Make one that works for all (or, at least, most) cases but is hideously complicated, or
2. 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.

Re:Just what IS a cell processor?

[master_p]

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.