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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.
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
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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.
No. You are mistaken. Xbox will have a PowerPC derivative. Not a POWER derivative. Also, I should note that Cell, although part is derived from the POWER4, is not really anything like the POWER4 architecture.
ruby -le"32.times{|y|print' '*(31-y),(0..y).map{|x|~y&x>0?'
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.
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.
All POWER-processors have been fully compliant (32 and 64 bit) PowerPCs since POWER3, and before that the RS64-procesosrs were too fully PowerPC compliant. So.. you are wrong in saying that most POWER-processors isn't PowerPCs since they have been since 1999, and they have been even more PowerPCs than "clean" PowerPCs since they until the 970 didn't have the full 64 bit ISA.
:)
The ISSCC papers state that Cell is Power based, not POWER based. There's a significant difference here since IBM in its marketing use the "Power" moniker to encompass both PowerPC and POWER processors. If you have seen different papers than I have, please provide me with an URL of PDF that proves me wrong. This is important stuff
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
The development kit for Xbox 2 is Windows NT4 for PPC with Xbox 2 extras.
Actually, CELL is based around the 970. Expect about 80-90% performance compared to an equivalently clocked 970. Where it goes nuts is that there's a number of vector units attached that are basically "VMX on steroids" to quote one of the main guys at IBM behind this. The vector units (or Data Plane Processors as they're calling them) can also communicate between each other as well as with the central core. The workstations are actually headless server blades, each of which will have 2 CELL's on them and they'll be running Linux.
This stuff isn't bullshit, it was all disclosed Thursday at the Australian Game Developers Conference. I didn't sign a NDA so it's all good. I also fondled a PSP =]
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
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
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!
Too bad 3M didn't get involved.
Then it would have been the STIM Cell processor.