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A Look Into The Cell Architecture
ball-lightning writes "This article attempts to decipher the patent filed by the STI group (IBM, Sony, and Toshiba) on their upcoming Cell technology (most notably going to be used in the PS3). If it's as good as this article claims, the Cell chip could eventually take over the PC market."
Posted only a couple of days ago too.
Timothy do you actually read Slashdot?
Cell Architecture Explained
Wow -- it's dupe night here at /. Previous Article
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
repost
Only if it complies with x86. Seriously, x86 will be around for a century.
Another overly broad patent issued...
Similar to the upcoming US election results
The article was interesting, but we dont have to read it twice.
Maybe slashcode should have a link repository, if someone adds a new story with a link, they get a warning another story pointing to the same link was posted 18 hours ago...
We've even seen triple-dupes.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Errr.... pearoast....
Reading the article makes it seem like all computers will disappear. I find it so hard to believe that the new cell processors will be that advanced. I can believe they are good for specialized uses but not as a general computer.
-- To mess up an OS X box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it.--
By 3Q 2006 Cells will be used to sniff out dupes on /.
The current X86 technology can't keep up.
"A Look Into The Cell Architecture"
Hey I know all about the cell architecture. There's DNA, and RNA, and some mitochondria, and protoplasm, and...
And maybe with this article someone can decipher if the Cell technology will eventually make a /. dupe detector that works in real-time.
"Timothy do you actually read Slashdot?"
Here's a better question. If he will not, why should we?
the cell processor is not in the PS2, its suppose to be in the PS3. Some IBM workstation that isnt released as of yet is suppose to be the first application of the cell processor.
an education. My Cat's hairballs could do better!
...when you don't read your own news site. :/
As someone posted above, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to at least make a "dupe check" program that tells you whether you have linked to the same URL before...
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
you know those guys can't READ
The original PS2 design was for a dataflow architecture - the Cell is a continuation (and significant evolution) of the theme. Interestingly enough, if this *does* take off it may be that the best programmers of tomorrow turn out to be the PS2 low-level guys, who've already written the algorithms that are about to be important.
In the PS2, the MIPS chip was there mainly to do the simple stuff, all the heavy lifting was done on the 2 vector processors, and they were designed to have programs uploaded into them and data streamed through them using a very flexible (chainable) DMA engine. Sounds similar (if in a limited sense) to the Cell chip itself.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The last time I read about a revolutionary chip that would forever change the world and the company was so great they even had the Linux creator as a board member it turned out to be not much more than a loud fart in the wind. (Enter Transmeta)
This is a distributed-processing-capable chip. They're moving software into the chip, doing what software can do in a more compact and probably more efficient way. There's nothing revolutionary here and besides being a dupe story it's way overrated. The only attractive here is the fact PS3 will use it instead of embedding something open, like Mosix.
And no it won't "eventually take over the PC market."
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
Not everyone checks slashdot every day and not everyone checks yesterdays news, so i can see that authors thought this artice was soo important that they posted it two times.. makes sence to me >_
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
its very rare for a system to be able to be completely parallelised.
There will always be "critical sections", data which can only be used by 1 thread at a time, which limits how much it can be split up.. Then you have programs which cant be.. I mean, you can split up a game for instance into a sound, video, and keyboard threads easily. To really utilise parallel processing takes a massive amount of code, which with current languages, seems to make it a bit implausible to get a massive increase.
It should also be remembered that the G5's and G4's already have altivec, and even though this is on a much grander scale, there will always be bottlenecks that slow it down preventing 99% of commonly used apps from getting a significantly large increase..
Okay, who was down for Timothy on Saturday night for the /. Dupe Pool?
Do not anger the worm.
By that logic, Slashdot should always have the same stories, because someone may have missed it otherwise. There's a link to yesterday's stories. Click it if you're interested.
If my job was posting news on a news site - i'm pretty damn sure i'd actually read that site.
How the mighty have fallen.
Besides the fact that this is a blatant dupe, anyone who takes this article seriously is as big a dickhead as the author.
It's so full of shit and blatantly wrong that I don't know where to begin.
You officially have the worst sarcasm filter on the planet
It's a cell architecture of Slashdot posts.
and your mother dresses you bad
Cell processors for sale! Slashdot calls it the best. Say that twice... May be thrice... Interested buyers check slashdot every day!
-ItsME
A measly 68k CPU with hardware that was autonomous.
A measly MIPS with hardware that is autonomous.
The only thing they need is to sync to the TV set.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This whole article was duped and yet you get modded down redundant? That's some harsh sh!t...
Cut the man some slack, jack.
P.S. I won't take that bet.
'cause you're Fuckin' FIRED!!!
Funny thing is, this is actually better than it used to be.
I remember when it seemed like every other day they would post the same story twice SAME day.
Throw the bums out!
Well, I think we all recognized that article was a little over enthusiastic but it does suggest some interesting possibilities.
First of all I want to say I think it is completly possible to make a processor with 8APUs and so forth. For starters PowerPC chips already have several seperate execution units on them, and I think they use fewer transitors than intel chips. Moreover, a huge chunk of the transitor budget goes to doing things like cache consistancy or complicated instruction prediction which is probably not used on the much simpler APUs.
Of course it seems like this is primarily of interest to game systems or signal processing applications (note that a 4 threaded 32 stream processors is just another way of saying 4 cell procesors, each has a PPC core with 8 APUs). However, I would not be so quick to dismiss this for the PC market. While it may be true that many individual applications may not easily multi-thread it seems we are approaching a point where the biggest complaint is not the maximum processing rate in one application but the ability to run multiple applications at once. On my computers I'm rarely if ever frustrated at the rate some program is running at, but slowdown in other programs when I run a processor intensive job or turn on a video. So while drawing a webpage may not be speed up by this processor drawing several webpages at the same time will be and that is the sort of thing which makes a big difference for the end user.
Also, a processor like this offers great possibilities for JIT and VM code. The main thread can dispatch instructions and threads to the APUs dynamically based on what is happening in the system. Also I find it interesting that IBM is going the same way as intel in pushing all the complexity on the compiler. It makes one wonder if itanium is really as dead as everyone thinks. Perhaps in 4 years when AMD can't squeeze anything more out of x86 intel will be ready to jump in having worked out all the bugs to their new chip.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
That'd be the PS3 that'll use the cell, not PS2.
I'll believe it when I see it. With a crazy new architecture like this, *everything* is on paper right now. The hardware, the software, everything. The only thing that is virtually gauranteed is that the PS3 will have a few of these things in it and that it will sell in droves. Just how useful and powerful this chip will be in practice remains to be seen.
Power consumption- the great equalizer.
The PS *3* will have (an expected 4, actually) cell processors inside. The PS2 has an embedded MIPS core and a couple of (pretty cool for the time) vector processors. The Cell is a much more advanced version of the PS2 ideas.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Nice job, editor.
Your information package for the idiot club is on its way via mail.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dally's Merrimac processor.
It's so similar that you wonder if they lifted it from him. The only difference is that Prof. Dally's chip has a big cache.
All the programs that run on PC architectures expect certain things to be in place - they expect a single fast central CPU. They expect that good cache usage is important for performance. They expect to have access to gobs of RAM. Etc. Etc. The PS2 (and by extension the cell) is completely different.
Consider a different architecture. You have a job that consists of multiple things to do. Some of these can be easily parallelised, others are mainly sequential. Divide it up so the parallel ones are coded separately, maybe with some IPC to synchronise to some clock.
For a sequential part (say rendering the object list of a scene back to front to gain occlusion) the approach that worked for me on the PS2 (which is logically similar, if significantly less powerful) was to divide the job into tasks. Each task (say, one per object in the above) gets its own bit of code and knows about the data that it needs to perform its task.
The key thing is that the Harvard separation of code and data just isn't, on a PS2. You set up a DMA chain that loads the program into the processor, then streams the data through the program on the processor, lather, rinse, repeat. Make the chain self-submitting and you can effectively forget about that chunk of code now, it'll just happen.
This is still doing things sequentially (but we've agreed that this is a sequential task, right?) - the point is that it's being done highly efficiently within the architectural constraints. You have a dataflow architecture and even sequential code can hit the performance limits if you code to the architecture.
The Cell looks even more powerful, in that you can chain execution modules together, so you can load code into APU's 1,2,3,4 and stream the data through 1,2,3,4 automatically before it's considered 'done'. This was possible on the PS2, but
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I though that I was reading slashdot before it came out. Turns out that it's just reposting the same news. Sad thing is that I actually had to go back and check to see if this really had already been posted.
:(
Well, guess I don't have any super brain powers
-Tim Louden
who wants to bet they'll post it a third time?
As I've suggested on previous occasions, it'd be better to start up a pool as to when it's posted again, and who posts it. My guess is Cmdr Taco, next Tuesday.
Odds are pretty long that Timothy would post it again, but never say never. =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"If there is a law in computing, Abstraction is it, it is an essential piece of today's computing technology, much of what we do would not be possible without it. Cell however, has abandoned it. The programming model for the Cell will be concrete, when you program an APU you will be programming what is in the APU itself, not some abstraction. You will be "hitting the hardware" so to speak.'
So we're all going to go back to assembler? I don't think so.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
...so they can check for dupes *before* posting!
/. headlines sometime... You can even do it via RSS, so no need to reload the whole homepage!
Hey timothy, try reading
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
This article is hype and air. Remember how the Emotion Engine was going to change the fabric of space and time? This guy was full of crap the first time this article was posted and nothing has changed. Seriously, why does /. post this crap? Someone from another board put it this way - His theory about reducing latency by transferring in larger block sizes is fascinating. So an articulated lorry should go around corners faster than an Elise because it has more wheels then? Okaaaay.
If, for example, HDTV set-top boxes supported email, Word, and spreadsheets, it'd happen pretty quickly.
I'm not buying a console-style computer until it supports GCC out of the box. I want the freedom to compile my own software for a given machine and distribute it without having to go through a console maker that refuses to even talk to individual developers and smaller firms.
Did you know that there are 37 stories between the two dup? I wonder if there's a story with an even smaller gap. :)
My bad, I thought this was going to an article about cubicles in the modern work environment.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
you cant mod an article -1 Redundant
whereas an an Intel chip will require processing of each procedure in sequence, the Cell can separate each procedure, pipeline the process, and produce results in a fraction of the time it takes an Intel chip.
And why can't a multi-core Intel system do the same?
The way to "upgrade" the Cell is also revolutionary, as buying another piece of electronics will increase the processing power of your household.
Adding more CPUs to handle more threads won't help if your apps are limited to a fixed number of threads, which may be common in the early days of Cell as more developers learn multithreaded programming or in the later days as publishers of proprietary programs try to charge for throughput *cough*Oracle multicore pricing*cough*.
A comment on the previous article challenged timothy to repost this on saturday as a dupe... which he did... jeez.. RTFC (Read the fscking comments)
And whats up with the slashdot listed email spammer protection nowadays? Its spam-harvester proofed AND human proofed :D
.at. .xNIX.Rules.
Parent commentor's email:SLowLaRIS.
uh... owa@xul.es? lw@x.ru? dot@dot.dot?
I'm so tired of dupes!
Worht a look on your break Check this out
"Wouldn't that be like eating from the toilet?"
Says the guy with a Slashdot account.
I've had for a very long time the suspicion that the XBox was basically just a big blindside at Sony. The XBox loses a huge amount of money, and looks as if it will continue to lose a huge amount of money right into the XBox 2 line; Microsoft must be doing this for some reason. My personal theory for awhile has been that at least one of Microsoft's motivations in spending all this money is because they see the Playstation as a potential future threat; i.e., they feared and fear that at some point the Playstation 2 or 3 or 4 will become so close in power and functionality to a PC that it will begin to supplant the PC for common tasks. This would be disastrous for Microsoft; their lockdown on the PC market is complete, but this doesn't protect them from the PC market itself being slowly eaten away at from the bottom by consumer electronics like the ones Sony makes. So to stave off this threat, Microsoft begins to instead grow the PC market it monopolizes downward, so that the PC (as it becomes the "Windows Media Center") begins to slowly suck up the consumer electronics market, competing directly with the Playstation, bringing the fight to Sony's door instead of Microsoft's. Since consumers wouldn't on their own be interested in a PC that supplants consumer electronics, Microsoft instead basically bribes them into being interested with subsidized hardware; they make a big money blackhole out of the XBox to undercut Sony's ability to maneuver with the Playstation, the way the money blackhole that was MSIE undercut Netscape's ability to maneuver.
This is, of course, all just conjecture.
But when I begin to see people seriously talking about the chip from the Playstation 3 eventually potentially being used in PC hardware, I begin to wonder if it's maybe reasonable conjecture...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's been said before, but mature industries tend towards three of something, such as GM-Ford-Chrysler. For CPUs, it has to be AMD64/ia32e, PowerPC, and SPARC. They're the only ones with any high-volume prospects. SPARC will certainly be in third place, with AMD64/ia32e and PowerPC duking it out for one and two. The fact of the matter is that Itanium won't be a mainstream processor, and PA-RISC, Alpha, and MIPS are all more-or-less EOL.
For operating systems it will still be Windows, Linux, and UNIX (predominately Mac OS and Solaris). Okay, that's four, but the other historical major players are all becoming niche legacy platforms.
For office suites, it'll be MS Office, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, and iWork. The others are all niche players.
For browsers it'll be IE, Firefox, and Safari.
At least this will tend to simplify some things, because the non-Microsoft platforms will be fewer making supporting them easier. This is a good thing, IMO.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
From all those features of the "cell" in the article, the only one of import is the fact that the system will attempt to isolate the user from any method used to control it. In other words anyone who "buys" this, will get something that works for Sony and IBM, not for the new "owner".
An old proverb teaches: A fool and his money are soon parted.
It seems these days we need an updated version: A damn stupid hypnotized by shiney beeds fool and his freedom in addition to money are soon parted.
Except for games the next XBox, PS3, and Nintendo Revolution are on PowerPC (The cell is PPC). If the Mac gets cell, the article claims it could be a massive turnaround, as the cell benchmarks seem to be well and beyond anything Intel could offer in the near future.
No kidding. That's exactly what I was thinking. x86 has been completely supplanted in the console market, with no share whatsoever. This encourages game developers to the PowerPC playform.
PS3 is Cell (PowerPC based), XBox is PowerPC 970 based (G5), and Nintendo is going to use something PowerPC based but won't give any details.
If Macs got cell, AND this article isn't overhyping it and it actually is this powerful, suddenly Macs could blow Windows PC's away. Heck, VirtualPC could probably run faster than most Windows PC's!
This would cause a massive migration to Macs for the high-end market. Add that to the fact that:
1) Game developers would already be using PowerPC systems to develop their games for all three consoles
2) The Macs would be far more powerful than their x86 counterparts, allowing for much higher-powered software and games
Apple may even coin the gaming market with gamers looking for super-powered gaming rigs!
Of course, most of this may never happen, but it'll be interesting to see what becomes of Cell.
Do subscribers to /. have anyway of complaining about this level of service?
This guy is way out there
THe word "dupe" isn't officially recognized as a synonym for duplicate, so the argument is pretty much moot.
Which "officials" regulate English? It's common knowledge among Slashdot regulars that "dupe" is a shortened form of the word "duplicate".
Seems amusing.
Post pointing out that Parent post is a duplicate of a recent story is itself modded as redundant.
Do we really need at least 11 different posts telling us that its a dupe? Do these people think that folks are too stupid to figure that one out for themselves?
Once would have been sufficent...
I'd mod you up if I had points.
While I don't think the author is a dickhead, he makes crazy assumptions and fills his editorial with personal opinions rendering this "article" nothing more then a weblog.
Everyone else around here is either bitching about the post being a dupe (without realizing the fact that their own posts are dupes of all the other losers that are pointing out the dupe) or reading this thing like it's fact.
While I'm sure these new CPU's will be novel, and they might be fast at some operations, I'm guessing they'll need to make some major compromises to get the thing to market. If it were really as brilliant and amazing and easy and fun as this guy makes it out to be, it would be bigger news.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
True to the format of the Cell architecture, it requires a cluster of slashdot posts to explain.
Below is a snippet from the patent itself:
9. The method of claim 1, wherein said second program is a decoding program.
10. The method of claim 9, wherein said decoding program decodes MPEG data.
11. The method of claim 9, wherein said decoding program decodes ATRAC data.
Is it just me or didn't sony recently own up to the fact that ATRAC was a technology that no one used? And why is it they believe they can embed ATRAC audio along with MPEG? Seems kind of stupid.
"This system isn't just going to rock, it's going to play German heavy metal!" - From 'Part 2 - Again Inside the Cell'
Ahahahahaha!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"If it's as good as this article claims, the Cell chip could eventually take over the PC market."
And if I had 4 legs, I could outrun a dog.
But I don't, so I can't. And this chip won't be as good as the (overenthusiastic) article claims. It won't take over the PC market.
This chip will take over the PC market the same way that BitBoys took over the graphics card market; the same way that Transmeta took over the mobile CPU market; the same way that the Elbrus 2k took over the desktop CPU market. That way is: deliver endless hype that you can't possibly back up. By the time it hits the market, the hype will be so built up that people won't be able to help but to feel let down by the chip. Then they'll lose interest in the product.
This chip might be fast for the money, and enable them to put 4 cores in a consumer device like the Playstation, but it's not going to outperform (or even match) a CPU like the P4 or Athlon 64.
When will people learn to stop falling for the same tricks?
Lets get real... every new system/console/processor that gets out from Nintendo/Sony/etc. can "replace" the PC.... ONLY because it can process and execute good graphyics... Then, the good ones are Nvidia or ATI... If you want a good video game system, buy a PC with a ultrafast procesor and a cool 3d graphics card (and a tweaked driver pherpars)...
He also sold tens of thousands of these boxes to a government agency who's name is Not Said Aloud. Seems their early APU-like design was very good at some important things.
Cells are the Next big thing. PS3 will indeed kick ass - real time virtual video - and so will future Macs. Maybe they'll be the same thing, eventually.
Oh, BTW, was that Sony's head on stage at MacWorld?
This is big and deserves duping. But we'll wait for the next time its /. to consider what you'd do if you were Sun, Intel, or Microsoft
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
This ability to act as a "stream processor" gives access to the full processing power of a Cell which is more than 10 times higher than even the fastest desktop processors... ...Most PCs now provide more power than is necessary and this fact combined with fast JIT emulators means that if necessary the Cell can provide PC compatibility without the PC.
Majority of software now is still compiled for x86, so Intel could still do very well off royalities when the Cell starts emulating Pentiums.
From TFA:
while a PS3 sits in the background churning through a SETI@home [SETI] unit every 5 minutes.
The Cell is designed to fit into everything from PDAs...
Let's ignore the obviously ridiculous claim that supercomputer-scale computing power is coming to my home in the next year or two and think about power consumption. How is this uber-CPU going to get enough battery power in a PDA?
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
@Nicholas Blachford; In reference to http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell4.htm l
"Multicore processors are coming to the x86 world soon from both Intel and AMD
[MultiCore], but high speed x86 CPUs typically have high power requirements. In
order to have 2 Opterons on a single core AMD have had to reduce their clock rate in
order to keep them from requiring over a hundred watts,"
Refer to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20420
AMD TDPmax = 95Watts with Dual core @2400Mhz. The Mhz target is in line with the
current Opteron x50 @2400Mhz.
"Changes are not unheard of in x86 land but neither Intel or AMD appear to be
planning a change even nearly radical enough to catch up. That said Intel recently
gained access to many of Nvidia's patents [Intel+Nvidia] and are talking about
having dozens of cores per chip so who knows what Santa Clara are brewing" -
Nicholas Blachford
Refer to
http://news.cens.com/php/getnews.php?file=/news/20 04/11/30/20041130013.htm&d
"Graphics-chip supplier Nvida Corp. and microprocessor giant Intel Corp. recently
entered into alliance while ATI Technologies Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices struck
a similar deal." - China Economic News Service/The Taiwan Economic News.
"To date the PC has defeated everything in it's path [PCShare]. No competitor, no
matter how good has even got close to replacing it. If the Cell is placed into
desktop computers it may be another victim of the PC. However, I think for a number
of reasons that the Cell is not only the biggest threat the PC has ever faced, but
also one which might actually have the capacity to defeat it". - NB
That's more to a PC (refering to Microsoft PC) than just CPU (or MPU)i.e. one must factor in XNA
initiative's need for VPU/GPU/GpGPU (general-purpose GPU(1)) partnership.
Side notes.
1. http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~vislab/projects/gpgpu/
Which is what this seems to resemble to me. http://vl.fmnet.info/transputer/
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
You almost sound like you've made it to 3rd grade, you cretin.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Why don't they just do a Cray 4 on a chip?
Seastead this.
You eat shit for breakfast?
I love dupes, you fucking worthless douchebags
That's not nearly as interesting as the Cell Architecture. You can read about it here.
Oh wait, that was already posted. Well its been over 6 hours, I must have forgot.
Whether you think it will suceed depends on where you think computing in general is going. The HPC crowd seems to like some aspects of it. Of course they think that anything that isn't parallelizable is crap. Using Cell for non parallel, streaming, ... etc, applications would be like trying to port Linux or a database to a graphics processor.
Same with *nix workstations - Linux and BSD will compile on ia64 already, and it's not that bad a chip. It'd have to be reworked, but probably no more than the Pentium 4 mobile chips were.
OTOH, they are far behind the curve - IBM already has the experiece with the GameCube, and Intel didn't have much to do with the XBox (and the XBox 2 isn't likely to have a x86 processor, anyway).
I don't think Intel wants to be in the game system market. Low margin, high volume, and not something you can make more money by selling upgraded processors in.
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
Nicholas Blachford is copying others and pushing his personal agenda. I wonder if he even read the patents. Others have long ago found all the relevant info, see this for example:
http://www.ps3land.com/CELL.ppt
The Paul Zimmon's slide set is much more objective and professional.
Also, his Amiga vs. PC comparison is only agenda setting which he has been doing long time. He has written numerous bullshit articles about operating systems, applications and hardware, and pretty often brings up the Amiga just because he likes it. Also, pay attention to his rhetorics.
...sarah conner!
But first it will face stiff competition from all the other chips that claimed to be just as good. Only the one true great pretender shall prevail.
In the article, they say the PS3 will have 4 Cells each running at 1.6v with 85W heat disipation!!! If that is true, they are not only going to need at least a 500W power supply (maybe significantly more), but also to get rid of 340W of heat! How is this going to fit under my TV?
Back when ps2 was state of the art, i couldnt help but think (as I've expressed in some other post lost somewhere around /.) that if sony ha allowed for linux4ps2 to evolve and mature, ps2's would abound by now.
If they allow independent development for other systems, manage to have a good chip (which i think they already have) add optional keyboard/mouse/dvi out, they could easily stick in the computer market.
Hell, i would use a ps3 for programming if it allowed it and had a nice pricetag cost(=500Eur)
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
In 1991, I and everyone else was told by Apple, Intel, and Motorola that x86 was dead, the power consumption of the Pentium chip was ridiculous and you could roast a hot dog on it. It's doomed! RISC is the future!
Now it's 2005 and the x86 internal architecture has changed a lot, but x86 is, as the poster said, going to live on for a century or so.
If you pack more data in the pointers, you'll have applications that break in a few years when that extra address space is needed. Ask Apple what happened when they moved from the 68000 (32-bit addresses of which only 24 bits were used) to the Mac II's 68020 (32-bit addressing). Four Macs (the II, IIx, IIcx, and SE/30) actually had versions of QuickDraw in ROM using the top byte to pack extra data into the pointers, as you recommend, and then Apple had to patch the entire QuickDraw package in RAM to code around this. Untold numbers of apps broke also of course.
Remember Atari computers?
p uter.html
They had the same technology and promised you the kitchen sink...
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/trans
Hey IBM, I hope you have all your patents covered on this concept, cuz prior art exists everywhere.
by that request [of availability of a compiler to the general public] i take it that your os of choice is either linux or some bsd variant.
As of early 2005, two leading desktop operating systems are Microsoft Windows XP and a FreeBSD variant. Windows supports GCC out of the box: use IE to download Firefox, and use Firefox to download MinGW.
this puts you outside of the user group a console style computer would be aimed for
It's not me as much as my audience. If I write a program, say a simple Tetris clone with a gimmick, I may want to GPL it and publish it on the Internet for download, not mailbomb every licensed game publisher, hoping beyond hope that one will take a game from a complete unknown. Look at "Get It Now" and the GAGIN hack, used to get user-created content onto a BREW cell phone.
Where are you getting your information, because this article seems to contradict much of what you talk about in the PPC 970 architecture.
A very important thing people seem to be missing in this whole thing is that the Cell processor is a next generation Blue Gene (PPC 440) processor. It's not a 970 class processor, it's a further specialized (i.e., souped up) version of a 440 that includes enhancements from Sony and Toshiba.
Frankly, everyone who was written about the Cell processor (except for IBM, Sony, and Toshiba) has been "way off the mark" including you.
And yes, desktop applications of this processor are not unthinkable, but impractical at this time. Operating systems, applications, and hardware drivers would have to be completely rewritten for this architecture. The Blue Gene architecture will take at least a decade to migrate to the desktop in its current form. I am not discounting a major breakthrough between now and then, but I wouldn't hold my breath. There's too much inertia in the Windows market to tear it down in less than a decade.
Intel gets no royalties from Pentium emulation as far as I've ever understood...what makes you think so?
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Looks like pilot production should begin soon on a 90 nm. process similar to that used for current Athlon 64s and Opterons. No word in this article on initial clock speeds and power dissipation.
Anyone have additional info?
BTW, another article I hadn't seen linked claims that Cell will be relatively easy to program...seems that Sony learned from some of its PS2 mistakes. That contradicts a lot of the threads responding to the original article and this dupe.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
"That's ridiculous. x86 is dead. The overheating and power consumption confirms it." ... right, because 90 nm Athlon64s and Centrinos use SO much power.
(hint: they don't)
"CISC hardware is horrible in mobile devices because of battery life and power consumption."
68K's are just fine for embedded use.
"All next generation consoles will use CISC hardware. Hence, economies of scale to get the price down."
You mean RISC, right?
"x86 is dead and mobile devices wrote the eulogy"
A more articulate post will be required to convinced me, I've afraid.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
The PS2 was revolutionary, in that it was the first successful non von Neumann machine. There have been many exotic architectures along these lines, from the Illiac III to the Transputer to the nCube to the Connection Machine, but they've all been failures in the marketplace. The PS2 sold in volume and made money. That was enough to get people to develop techniques for programming dataflow machines, which aren't fun to program. Working out those problems delayed games for the PS2 by a year or two, but now it's been figured out.
Now that the techniques have been worked out, at least within the game development community, a new generation of the same approach makes sense. Especially for graphics, which parallelizes well. You can keep throwing hardware at graphics until you get to one processor per pixel per triangle, and still get performance improvements.
Note the limitations. Each vector processor has only 128K (not MB) of local memory. This is like DSP programming; you don't have much local storage. There's access to main memory, but it will stall the vector processor, so you can't overdo it. Bashing your problem into chunks that fit that constraint is a major hassle.
Appropriately, other people replying to parent have forgotten this or ignore parts of it like the comment that it applies to "99% of commonly used apps", which is clearly true. (Yes, there are parallelizable tasks on the PC. Those are often coded in MMX or SSE. Guess about what percentage of commonly used apps those are?) [Paragraph added for comment lameness reasons.]
It's just business as usual.
Not terribly familiar with what "business as usual" means for Microsoft, are you?
People keep dragging in this "lose money on the consoles, make money back on the games" thing. There's two problems.
First, this isn't something that's particularly followed by anyone successful in the videogame market. As far as I know the playstations weren't sold at a loss except very early in their respective lifespans, before production could be completely ramped up. The Gamecube is known to have been sold at a profit right up until the price drop to $99, and even then the loss was described by Nintendo reps as insignificant.
Second, this isn't the strategy that Microsoft follows. The strategy they follow is more like "you give the camera away and don't make it back on the film". The price of the XBox has gone down? Well, the division's still losing money like a sieve. Halo 2's sold a lot of copies but so did Halo 1; holding publishing rights to two successful games isn't going to hold back billions of dollars in losses, and Halo 2 isn't terribly likely to have much effect on H&E's bottom line except over this one quarter comprising its release.
They'll continue to lose money because they're going to do the same thing with the XBox 2 they did with the XBox 1. There's signs they're looking into cheaper production with the XBox 2-- the whole PowerPC thing, and the rumors about leaving out the hard drive-- but they've given all public indication that they still intend to have the most powerful console again next time, and that they also wish to beat their competitors to market. I seriously doubt they can do this without continuing to lose money, and why not? It isn't like the parent company's going to mind if they do continue to lose money indefinitely.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
yeah, mike bibby just had one last night
Dupe dupe duuupe,
Dupe dupe dup duuupe,
Dupe dupe duuupe,
Dupe duuuuupe.
To: Nicholas Blachford
:) Maybe MS will even take a lesson from the XBox and start selling desktops with IBM chips, as you say; the tech industry is a very surprising place.
Cc: Slashdot
IBM is wisely compiling its abstraction instead of interpreting it every time the program runs, as with bytecode. OS-agnostic sandboxed mini-executables... brilliant. Way to go, IBM. Of course, they have the luxury of no back compatibility when they work with TVs and game consoles.
Note that unless someone finally makes machine-checkable watermarking work in the real world, DRM is much more for proprietary software product activation, and pretty much worthless for content. All you need is one machine somewhere with "AV in" jacks, and Radio Shack cables. Even if that's not what the DRM salesmen say.
I have enormous hopes you're right this design will, as you say, play German heavy metal! Just don't forget the possibility that they're over-patenting and quoting a lot of maximum numbers: "On this 10th day of June 1919, the Estes model rocket corporation hereby patents solid propellant, which could hypothetically possibly be used to reach the moon and/or accelerate a human to half lightspeed."
"many OSs will support multiple processors but many applications do not and will need to be modified accordingly - a process which will take many, many years. Cell applications will be written to be scalable from the very beginning as that's how the system works." What's in a name? That which we call a rewrite by any other name would take as long. Perhaps you're right that JIT emulation can solve it. I hope so, since this would also free the market from back-compatibility and the associated monopolies and shoddiness. Especially productivity apps, since old games are fairly unpopular anyway. I'd love to see the Cell kill x86, and for that matter Linux and OpenOffice kill MS, but I'm not laying bets.
"Sony could always pull a fast one and produce a PS3 on a card for the PC. Since it would not depend on the PC's computational or memory resources it's irrelevant how weak or strong they are." Except backplane bottlenecks in the motherboard, especially for AV output. Of course, this would cut into Sony's actual PS3 sales. I hope IBM doesn't have contractual or strategic reasons to keep the Cell out of the x86 market. Just as Intel licensed x86 to AMD, IBM or the consortium will have to license Cell to any new manufacturers. (Can anyone please update the "x86" entry at wikipedia to clarify the IP status of x86?)
You're right about Apple having a new chance at the mainstream; but after their bizarre failure to do the same until now, I'm half convinced they're just secretly a research firm owned and operated by and for Microsoft.
I lean towards the conservative view when it comes to tech market predictions. The last genuinely disruptive consumer technologies we've had are, what? Cameras going digital? Cell phone texting? Blackberries and laptops and Palms, which have been around for ages? Java squeezing C++ for the past 10+ years? MS crushing Netscape nearly 7 years ago?! On the other hand, Firefox rocks. Maybe copyleft really is where it's at.
The final word? You may be right, and I admire you for trying to extract useful information from a patent. But have you read many other patents, and are you sure you can derive specs from this one with any reliability? If not, this will only be an incremental step, not a revolution. And even if it could be a sharp increase, it may never take on Intel for the desktop, as the PS2 shows.
Until Netcraft confirms it, I won't believe it.