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More Cell Processor Details And First Pictures
slashflood writes "After reading two articles on slashdot about the Cell architecture and another one that criticizes the extensive roundup of the STI patents, I found the first pictures of the Cell core. It seems that at least some predictions were true. Seeing is believing." mtgarden points to this ZDNet article which says that the "first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague on how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz." (More below.)
Hack Jandy writes "Anand Shimpi has some details about the upcoming Cell processor (PS3) in his personal blog. According to Anand, "Rambus announced that the new Cell processor uses both Rambus XDR memory and their FlexIO processor bus. Because Rambus designed the interface for both the memory controller(s) and the processor interface, the vast majority of signaling pins are using Rambus interfaces - a total of 90% according to Rambus." Hasn't Rambus been showing up a lot again recently? The fact that Cell uses XDR has been widely speculated, but the fact that it will also use the Rambus bus signalling is something completely new."
Now my dreams will have a visual to go with them...
How about HL2 benchmarks?
Cell processors could really dominate. With how cheap they arespeculated to be, their distributed processing, and their all around speed, the could take over a significant part of the computer marketshare. If Cell processors also have the Power4 processors in them, this could be a replacement for x86. Could be. As other articles have pointed out, x86 has had superior competition in the past, and has been able to weather it. We shall wait and see. Cheers
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Is the cell processor a vector based CPU like previous PS cpu's? If so a cluster could prove quite formidable indeed!
(Seriously, vector processors are great for weather and nuklear simulations)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The Cell is going to be in the PS3, so does that mean that the PS3 will be clocked at 4.6 GHz+? That seems like a big leap considering consoles are normally running a little slower than "good" computers at the time they come out.
Sigs are for the weak.
There were some earlier reports that Cell processors (or at least a smaller verison of them) would be found in everything from high-end company servers to your PDA. This wide-spreading of such a single type of processor should make it at least somewhat easier for software vendors to write cross-platform titles. This means we might be able to finally play high-end games on your cellphone!
The next xbox is going to have a hard time beating this.
I understand the chip will be used in Playstation 3, but it will also likely be used in future Apple computers, of which, the G5 is already based on the Power architecture. Maybe IT would've been a better section to put this under?
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
I'm waiting to see how much work it can actually do before making a judgement. At the least it always exciting to have another option. I wonder how difficult it will be to take advantage of the new architecture.
Shouldn't that he 4.6 THz?
have you hurd linux can now out-cell windows... perhaps now goku can win.
While 4.6 GHz sounds impressive, I thought we were getting away from the notion that clock speed = performance. The Pentium 4 killed off clock speed comparisons.
I must admit the specs are impressive, but show me the benchmarks!
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I believe Sony and IBM and Toshiba are going to produce this thing as a joint venture, calling it "Cyberdyne" also naming the PS3 online game network Skynet, sounds promising...
I don't think the final PS3 part will be clocked much higher than 3.5GHz. Otherwise it would probably involve downclocking parts of the CPU to maintain a sane thermal profile, thus making overall performance rather unpredictable. This would especially impact games, where it's all about sustainable framerates at 100% CPU utilization.
They could make a coffee maker with this processor in it.
So this will just be like the last time Rambus had their hooks into a product, it will die a very expensive and slow death.
Cell may be cheap, but the RAM will be $5/MB. Sad to see IBM repeat the mistake Intel learned from.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If IBM can produce these things in enough volume this could be the ideal linux platform for the future.
PS3 is expected to sell very well so the chip production might be soaked up by the game consoles but you never know.
I bet apple engineers are salivating right now too.
Promises to be interesting for intel and AMD next year.
Get a free Mac Mini
http://www.scee.presscentre.com/imagelibrary/detai l.asp?MediaDetailsID=25555
:
CELL...bringing supercomputer power to everyday life with latest technology optimized for compute-intensive and broadband rich media applications
SUMMARY:
Cell is a breakthrough architectural design -- featuring 8 Synergistic Processing Units (SPU) with Power-based core, with top clock speeds exceeding 4 GHz (as measured during initial laboratory testing).
Cell is OS neutral - supporting multiple operating systems simultaneously
Cell is a multicore chip comprising 8 SPUs and a 64-bit Power processor core capable of massive floating point processing
Special circuit techniques, rules for modularity and reuse, customized clocking structures, and unique power and thermal management concepts were applied to optimize the design
CELL is a Multi-Core Architecture
Contains 8 SPUs each containing a 128 entry 128-bit register file and 256KB Local Store
Contains 64-bit Power ArchitectureTM with VMX that is a dual thread SMT design - views system memory as a 10-way coherent threaded machine
2.5MB of on Chip memory (512KB L2 and 8 * 256KB)
234 million transistors
Prototype die size of 221mm2
Fabricated with 90nanometer (nm) SOI process technology
Cell is a modular architecture and floating point calculation capabilities can be adjusted by increasing or reducing the number of SPUs
CELL is a Broadband Architecture
Compatible with 64b Power Architecture(TM)
SPU is a RISC architecture with SIMD organization and Local Store
128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor
High speed internal element interconnect bus performing at 96B/cycle
CELL is a Real-Time Architecture
Resource allocation (for Bandwidth Management)
Locking caches (via Replacement Management Tables)
Virtualization support with real time response characteristics across multiple operating systems running simultaneously
CELL is Security Enabled Architecture
SPUs dynamically configurable as secure processors for flexible security programming
CELL is a Confluence of New Technologies
Virtualization techniques to support conventional and real time applications
Autonomic power management features
Resource management for real time human interaction
Smart memory flow controllers (DMA) to sustain bandwidth
This seems good, but what exactly can I do with a cell processor other than play games with better graphics? It seems like the vast majority of people don't use even half of the power their computers have today, and if there are bottlenecks in todays computers it is because of RAM and the OS and not because of the CPU. Other then games, when will I be able to do other than maybe look for aliens faster.
I seem to remember there was major problems with Export guidelines in Japan for the PS/2. If this processor is even more powerful I wonder if similar problems will occur this time around.
Don't want those dreaded terrorists creating stealth cruise missiles with their PS/3s now, do we?
"first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague on how much faster" But I thought GHz didn't matter?
WASTE - The Secure P2P
My PS2 is already unnacceptibly noisy. When playing dramatic games like Silent Hill, the sublte nuances are drowned out by the WHIRRRRR of the PS2 box. I guess I should lock it up in a cabinet or something.
I can't imagine something this big and fast being quieter.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Sir, you fail.
They zoomed in on this press photo of an engineer holding a die.
Chuck moore's 25x had 25 misc cores on one die. Specs:
.2 sq mm asynchronous microcomputer core
5 x 5 array of cores: 60,000 Mips
5 horizontal, 5 vertical parallel interconnect buses: 180 Ghz bandwidth
Specialized computers to interface off-chip.
Max power 500 mW @ 1.8 V, with 25 computers running
100mAh battery life is 1 year, with 1 computer running throttled
64-pin SOIC: mirrored pin-out to 4ns cache SRAM
Array chips on 2-sided PCB
Shortly after he announced the chip, he took the link off his page. According to a post from him he's in a lawsuit
The Cell processor is pretty cool, but i see some room for improvement. They could have made simpler cores, and lots more of them.
Remember how the Emotion Engine worked us all into a lather five years ago? And when it came out, it was just merely competitive with contemporary processors? Sony is great at churning out nerd fetish tech, but they have a terrible track record of living up to their promises. Let's hope it's different this time.
My friend just called me from the ISSCC. He got a couple more bits of info, including that STI plan to recoup their R&D expenses largely from other consumer multimedia devices and NOT from selling Cell processors or Cell processor based computers, meaning they will be surprisingly inexpensive. Yeah!!!
Knowing Steve Jobs..
By 2006, instead of having a "Genie" effect in OSX, he'll actually have real Genies.
Seriously, I've noticed that Intel is probably teh 2nd favourite target here after Microsoft (ok, 3rd favourite now that SCO claimed the throne). When Intel does something some way, it's bad and stupid, when someone else does, it's good and better than Intel.
Like the whole ISA things. People always seem to be down on Intel for sticking with x86. They like to talk about what a hack it is, and how much better a RISC archetecture is, and so on. Then the IA-64/x86-64 fight comes and now AMD's the good guys for sticking with x86-64 and pushing backwards compatibility. WTF?
But yes, you are correct, the real question is how much work can it get done, sepcificly how much work can it get done for the kinds of things consumers want. It's all well and good to crank on theoritical benchmarks, but what really matters is the wall clock. How long does it take to render a scene in a 3d program, how long does it take to create a mixdown in audio software, etc.
Only time will tell with these. However, given that IBM is casting in on them, I'd say it's more than just hype. They already have a fast processor on a "normal" technology, they aren't messing with this new stuff just for fun.
It would depend a lot on what the manufacturing capacity is expected to be. The PS3 alone would be a pretty significant commitment. But with all of places these things are set to appear, and their expected performance, I would imagine that testing waters of the PC market could produce quite the demand crunch. Which is good for margins, but can have other effects like pissing off customers who remember slights in a fast moving market with viable alternatives.
Something like a jump into PC's with limited availability, and premium prices only to reveal an FDIV bug (lets say) later could provide quite the perfect storm, way worse than what Intel went through.
...will it still respect you in the morning?
How useful is this outside of the game market? This thing looks just rediculously optimized for gaming, but how many advantages does it really have elsewhere? People are willing to put up with crazy shit to optimize everything in games, but in the real world, not so much. Remember, the Itanium had some nice specs too, and one of the main reasons it flopped was because compilers just couldn't effectively optimize for its crazy moon language.
And even in gaming, how well will Sony be able to utilize this thing? Computing power is not very useful when-- as PS2 programmers had to-- you spend most of that computing power just making up for other deficiencies of the hardware (in the PS2's case, poor texture memory).
I am hoping Sony surprises and impresses me when I actually see this thing in action. Until then, I shall wait.
- Super Ugly Ultraman
with IBM is pushing linux, I can't see microsoft ditching their good buddy Intel, and throwing money at IBM by porting windows to run on the Cell processor. I would guess that this would allow Intel to retain their market share, even if the Cell is infact a far superior processor.
- a regular CPU (good for program flow/logic and interdependant operations),
- a vector unit (good for large arrays with no conditionals),
- and 8 stream processors (good for applying the same operations plus flow control to lots of independant chunks of data).
w00t!what does your oscilloscope need a D/A converter for? Do you mean an A/D converter? And why 1,024 bits? That's 128 channels worth of 8-bit A/D.
What scope is this?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Both Sony and Apple use IBM PowerPC cores in products. This doesn't mean that if Sony creates a crazy PowerPC derivative, someday Apple will be using it as well.
Maybe we'll see posts about the Cell in the Apple section when either Apple or Sony says one word publicly about potential Apple use of the Cell, and maybe we'll see posts about the Cell outside the Games section when specific real-world plans are announced to use the Cell processor for anything except games.
fact #1 Apple and Sony have been awfully close for the past few years- with some dialogue between the two CEOs.
fact #2 Apple has signed up to display at E3 this year- but hasn't published any official info on their site.
fact #3 The Mac is somewhat deficient when it comes to gaming when compared to the Windows PC.
So my speculation is that it is possible that Apple intends to build a new Mac aimed at the gaming market that will be compatible and play Sony's PS3 games- Apple in turn could publish games for the PS3.
Apple's Connection to the Cell Processor
For those of you wondering about the power consumption of this thing, perhaps you should note that Sony just licensed LongRun2 from Transmeta. It is a dynamic solution for power consumption and leakage that will probably end up in the 65nm versions coming out next year. google transmeta sony for more.
Once touted as the Intel killer, perhaps Transmeta will finally have its day.
Well, maybe $5/MB for end users like you and me, but, well, Sony so far is the only announced customer for this chipset, and they will likely be buying the RAM in *SUCH* bulk that I suspect they'll be getting a nice price.
Given, Sony may be making some sort of mistake by locking themselves into Rambus memory perpetually in case Rambus decides they want better terms later, but remember, Sony dictated the specs of this Cell thing. If it uses Rambus memory, it isn't because IBM wanted this, it's because Sony wanted this. I SERIOUSLY doubt Sony would have given Rambus the go-ahead as the Cell memory vendor if they hadn't locked Rambus into an extremely reasonable price ahead of time.
High end cames on your cellphone? Tell me when I can buy a cellphone with a Geforce 6800 PCI-e (heck, I'll settle for a Geforce 2 MX in a cellphone) in it, and then maybe we'll talk high-end games.
Sounds a lot like their Emotion Engine, which could "render Toy Story like animation in real time".
Too bad it couldn't come close to living up to the hype.
With all this talk about the Cell being 4x as fast as a dual core Opteron, I'm willing to bet that when the chip comes out its actual speed will be similar to a low/mid range P4/Athlon.
It won't kill AMD or Intel, it won't dominate the processor market, it won't take the computing world by storm, and it won't even take the performance lead.
The only thing this is taking by storm is the PR and marketing business.
the eight SPUs will be used fully on the copyright protection of the PS3. So that just leaves the powerpc core for the actual games itself.
they say this cpu has 234 million transistors!
is it just me that has a bad memory, or is that around 5 times more than any other cpus on the market right now? this is just plain SICK
hope they got some pretty nifty technology to prevent this baby from going up in smoke, because i am NOT attaching a huge A/C to that thing! i find my p150 is noisy, and the p4 laptop unbearable. can't imagine what this will be like
"Engineers were vague on how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely."
Does it really matter what the processor's clock frequency is? Tell me how it performs on tests, how much heat it dissipates!
How much power does the chip draw? I'm used to heating my entire house with Intel processors; if this chip is significantly more efficient, then I'm going to get pretty cold next winter...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If you just use it normally there's nothing particularly special about the emotion engine. But what is impressive about the emotion engine is the opportunities it offers for optimization.
Poorly programmed PS2 games don't look as nice as those on, say, the Dreamcast. However when the emotion engine is used properly you'll notice that the PS2 can produce graphics almost on par with those of the Gamecube and XBox. This is pretty damn impressive considering the PS2 is nearly two years older than either of those.
Basically the emotion engine shouldn't be compared to conventional hardware, because it isn't. It's just one huge vector processor. And the Cell chip is an even huger vector processor...
The math makes sense now. 8 APUs, 2 pipelines per APU, 4 operations (SIMD) per clock, at 4GHz. That gives 256 gigaflops!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"plan to recoup their R&D expenses largely from other consumer multimedia devices and NOT from selling Cell processors or Cell processor based computers, meaning they will be surprisingly inexpensive. Yeah!!!"
However, from the press release:
Prototype die size of 221mm2
When it comes to chip manufacturing, the cost of a chip is basically a direct function of the area. A 221 mm^2 chip size is pretty damn big; this thing isn't going to be cheap. Even considering IBM's extensive fabrication experience, Sony will probably have to sell this at a significant loss to make the PS3 palatable to gamers.
Granted, this is a prototype, so they can probably shrink it further by production, but it still won't be something cheap. Don't count on being able to buy these cheaply to make your own parallel supercomputer.
Forget it, just some kid trying to sound important. Probably doesn't have a clue about what he's talking about. That's what happens when bachelor's degrees are required for clerical work and universities admit anyone.
"first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague on how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz." Who else is tired of this poor reporting technique, in which a reporter compares future technology to current? It would be like AMD saying they have a new CPU coming out that hits 10 ghz, compared to Intel's current 3.8. Oh, but wait it won't be out for four years. This is sensationalist nonsense, trying to invoke awe at what a miracle IBM has performed, blowing out of the water AMD and Intel. I heard that the PS3 will have 5000 of these and they can actually fly and make you psychic.
Two things make noise in a PS2: (1) FAN and (2) DVD DRIVE.
The processor doesn't make any noise (duh).
Having a better processor might cause more HEAT thereby necessitating more efficient cooling (if Sony are dumbasses they will accomplish this with a bigger, noisier FAN but somehow I think they will not fall into that trap).
"This seems good, but what exactly can I do with a cell processor other than play games with better graphics? It seems like the vast majority of people don't use even half of the power their computers have today..."
And yet we just got through with an IBM story about were all the cycles have gone. Take your pick folks. Too much, or not enough?
Hmm, if cell is running at 4+GHz, then why can't IBM seem to get equiv. clock speed plain jane Power5's out the door?
Supposedly, since the Cell is designed for distributed processing, it will be usefull in cellphones... but I'd rather have a cellphone that I can reliably talk on, rather than one that a cracker halfway around the world can take over and use as a spambot! They seem to be making a lot of promises about the Cell hardware that can only be realized in software -- software that hasn't been written yet!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
so does this mean XIII will run even better?
"Sounds a lot like their Emotion Engine, which could "render Toy Story like animation in real time"."
Hypes not new. Nvidia has been saying something similiar. Can we pick on them now?
Before everyone starts having digital orgasms over this chip we should take a sit back and watch approach. This all sounds amazing on paper as did PS2 and look how that turned out in terms of hardware power.
We have no idea if developers will be able to easily adapt and get any real performance out of this thing above and beyond what they get from CPU's now. Almost nobody uses the vector units in PS2, who says they will start now? In terms of just gaming I wanna see some games and examples of this thing running in real time before i start taking my wallet out of my pocket, Sony burned me last time with underpowered bug ridden hardware, ill be damned if i let them do it again.
If it is Sony, I doubt they would be all too eager to give give Apple (You know, the Ipod guys, who stole the upscale music player market from its "rightful" owner, Sony) a head start into the multimedia market Sony will eventually want to focus on when their playstation customers grow up.
Did you RTFA? From the second article:
Die size: 221mm^2
Transistor count: 234m
SPE Size: 2.5x5.81mm
SPE Interconnect: 4x128bit ring bus
SPE local memory: 256KB
SPE decode rate: 2 insns/cycle
SPE resources: 7 execution units (unspecified type)
They also mention the core voltage of the CPU (1.3V), the fact that the memory has been tested to 5.4GHz, detail the temperature monitoring scheme, and the fact that the SPEs are in-order chips. This is all new information.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How quickly a clock cycle runs through a processor. It tells us nothing about how many instructions are in flight, says nothing about how much cache the processor has for data and instructions, tells us nothing about the heat dissapation and memory bus of the architecture, the chipset features, or any number of other things that affect processor performance. I wouldn't care if it ran at 4.77MHz like my original IBM PC1, as long as it performed well doing the tasks it was designed to do and fit with what I do on a daily basis, either at home or at work.
So why should we care if it runs at 4.6 GHz compared to 3.8 GHz? Means nothing to me. It's not like RPMs and horsepower in cars, that analogy doesn't work. It's what the processor can do with those clock cycles that's impressive, not how many cycles it takes it to do the same task.
Here you go: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/07/231 0237
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
All you computing base are belong to us.
Ok, lets go into the rabbit hole for a moment, and assume this thing will live up to its hype..
What will it do for our everyday security? How secure will our encryption be? Will 3des be breakable in near realtime? Will SSL be safe anymore? Or even AES 128 bit? or 256bit? Our GPG keys? Digital certs?
How much computing power is needed to break those, and how much does one cell give?
How much computing power can one person, or a small group be able to grab? Think about it. A guy borrows some playstations from some friends. How much can he do with that? Or one working in a shop, and borrows a few? Or certain shady organizations.. How much can they afford to buy in, and how much damage can they do with it?
I'm taking the "worst possible outcome" approach here, and I'm starting to feel a bit paranoid..
Could some enlightened souls please tell me how foolish I am, so I can sleep easily at night?
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
The reason this chip isn't as hot as the sun is because its being produced by a smaller nm process than current processors. The smaller the nm process the smaller the transistors and therefore less power and heat are required for the same clock speed. AMD is still using a 130nm process to produce most of its processors with a 90nm factory opening soon to produce a new line of chips. These Cell processors are going to be produced using a 60-65nm process in factories that are currently under construction by IBM, Sony and Toshiba.
The factories to mass produce these things aren't even finished yet, so don't get your hopes of seeing one up until mid summer 2006.
P4 processors have 125 million Transistors in them now and use a 90nm process. If they double that number (ie. 2 cores anyone), they will have 250 million transistors, 15 million more than the 235 million purported to be on the cell.
I'd be far more worried about malcode (virii, worms, etc) taking hold in the cross-platform evironment the parent mentions than worrying about games.
Sony's PS3 will kill them!!!
open4free © hohoho
They don't say that the SPU's are PPC cores. Only the main processor is. So I'm thinking the SPU's are really just fancy floating point units. That is nice and all, but it may be harder to find 8-way floating point calculations, than 8 threads. I'm having a hard time believing that these SPU's are general purpose processors.
Posted Here
From TFA:
"Cell-based products will be used in devices ranging from digital televisions to home servers to supercomputers, they said."
Sweet, I've always wanted my TV to double as a supercomputer. Maybe then it can tell me if the weather guy is yanking my chain.
Jiggity
Now all we need is um...what is it...
Oh yeah! SOFTWARE that can run on it. That will be oh, a few years. Sure, Linux will have a blend that will run on it fairly quickly, but like, these new processors won't take any market away from what's already there. It'll just replace what's there with faster.
Until it can compete with Wintel on all levels, it'll be just like Transmeta - not much.
There seems to be alot of confusion surrounding the Cell chip. This is not "just another processor", and it certainly has little to do with clock frequencies - the Cell is a whole new architecture, which might just be a glimpse into the future of computing.
To begin with, it might be useful with some background on the ps2 architecture - there are a couple of really great in-depth articles at Ars Technica; Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine and The PlayStation2 vs. the PC: a system-level comparison of two 3D platforms.
What made the ps2 so awesome was that it was custom-built specifically for multimedia-processing, which requires completely different processing environments than general-purpose computing. Normal PCs are made for computing where you have a large number of instructions working on a small data-set (such as a spreadsheet) - this requires large data-caches close to the CPU, while instructions are streamed continually from RAM. Media-processing is the other way around; you have "simple" operations (like doing the calculations for a single pixel), which are run on a large set of data - so you wouldn't really need any data-caches. The ps2 did exactly this; it removed almost all the caches (only a few tiny ones were left), but it had a totally insane bus bandwidth. To borrow an analogy from the mentioned Ars Technica article:
"Here's a goofy example to help you visualize what I'm talking about: imagine a series of large buckets, connected by pipes to a main tank, with a cow lapping water out of each bucket. Since cows don't drink too fast, the pipes don't have to be too large to keep the buckets full and the cows happy. Now imagine that same setup, except with elephants on the other end instead of cows. The elephants are sucking water out so fast that you've got to do something drastic to keep them happy. One option would be to enlarge the pipes just a little (*cough* AGP *cough*), and stick insanely large buckets on the ends of them (*cough* 64MB GeForce *cough*). You then fill the buckets up to the top every morning, leave the water on all day, and pray to God that the elephants don't get too thirsty. This only works to a certain extent though, because a really thirsty elephant would still end up draining the bucket faster than you can fill it. And what happens when the elephants have kids, and the kids are even thirstier? You're only delaying the inevitable with this solution, because the problem isn't with the buckets, it's with the pipes (assuming an infinite supply of water). A better approach would be to just ditch the buckets altogether and make the pipes really, really large. You'd also want to stick some pans on the ends of the pipes as a place to collect the water before it gets consumed, but the pans don't have to be that big because the water isn't staying in them very long."
So, what does this have to do with the Cell? The Cell takes this concept even further. Cell systems are made up of multiple processors, called APUs (Attached Processing Units), which are connected using an insanely fast data bus. Each APU can be programmed to handle one specific task, and then pass the data on to the next APU for a different task. By doing this, you can just put in more processors to increase the throughput of the system. This works especially good for multimedia processing, which can be pipelined like this pretty easily. Here are a couple of snippets from the Wikipedia entry:
"While the Cell chip can have a number of different configurations, the workstation and PlayStation 3 version of Cell consists of one "Processing Element" ("PE"), and eight "Attached Processing Units" ("APU"). The PE is based on the POWER Architecture, basis of their existing POWER line and related to the PowerPC used by Apple
IBM is going to be the first company that will start selling cell based products and then Sony will start too. Also this processor it owned by IBM and NOT Sony. So IBM can sell it to whoever they want to. Some time in 2005 IBM is going to start selling workstations and servers with cell processors in them even though IBM does not call them cells (like Sony does) but Power PC (which is the correct name anyway). As before those high end workstations and servers do not run windows plus the PowerPC architecter has never been supported by M$ anyway. What is interesting to know though, is that the new PowerPC processors run/emulate all the instructions that a regular x86 processor can run. Later in the year IBM will demonstrate a workstation with the new PowerPC architecture running windows xp, linux, aix, and another os at the same time. So the new PowerPC is really really fast and powerful. Tremble Intel and AMD before the power of IBM ...
The main os for the PowerPC/cell is linux though with some custom patches from IBM. After all you didn't expect IBM to switch to linux if they didn't have an ace up their sleeve now did you?
Oh yeah and as far as Macs go I got news for you cells are not being to be in there for a long time. So dot sell your G5 just yet.
if by second article you mean the http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell1.htm l it's not really credible at all.
it's not real facts about what the _real_ cell will be able to do when it's out. it's just steam in the hype machine guessworking out something along the lines of "oh boy oh boy oh boy it's gonna be sooo goooood and this |-------------------| fast".
it's not out yet - there's no real facts about what it can do, nor is there real facts about what clockspeeds it will run and what kind of integer/traditional _real_ performance you can get out of it.
so these 'articles' are quite useless. they're 'reviews' done with marketing material, some of which is starting to get quite old marketing material too and was probably optimistic too, of course, because you can promise *anything* if it's two years into the future when you'll have to actually deliver.
the biggest point however is that sony overhyped it's last consoles cpu just as much and failed to deliver utterly.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Does that make terminators the aimbots?
If you can help clarify some of this for me, thanks.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This is about IBM, Apple and Sony ganging up on Microsoft in a BIG WAY.
It certainly does appear that Mac OS X could be the primary beneficiary of the new CELL processor.
GUSTO!
They already tried this for the PS2.
the whole point of the cell in a cell phone would be not needing a gpu or large cpu to run graphic intensive games. with cell we should be able to get at LEAST ps2 level graphics in a small cell phone.
Then how are people writing the kind of games that are coming out for it now?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Just wondering if Sony is keeping exclusivity for this technology? Or, has IBM developed it for them and can use it on (possibly) desktop PCs but not in other consoles?
You're making a common, but incorrect assumption. Yes, both Microsoft's and Sony's new consoles will be using IBM processors. But there is no way in hell Microsoft is getting the Cell processor for the next Xbox.
The new Xbox is rumored to be using dual-core Power PC chips. Nothing very new there and not very different from what one can buy in a Mac today.
To see why Microsoft won't be getting the cell, one only has to consider the huge level of investment Sony has made to the initiatiave. Not only has Sony been involved in the development of Cell for a number of years, they're even building their own multi-billion dollar Cell chip manufacturing plant.
Would Sony become this involved in development and production of a revolutionary processor just to let their leading console rival use it right out of the gate? I could almost guarantee you MS is contractually locked out of the Cell for a few years yet.
The final straw is that the next Xbox is probably going to be shiping before Cell chips are even in mass production. I guess you might see a Cell in Xbox 3, look for that around 2009.
Sorry, I mean the second article out of the two new ones. Blachford's is an older one. Anyhow, I don't see how these aren't real facts. They cite some very important points about the architecture, and to someone who knows how CPUs work, they are quite useful in predicting the performance of the thing. In particular, the fact that the SPEs are in-order tells you a whole lot about how important instruction scheduling is going to be.
With regards to the EE, it wasn't a failure at all. The EE delivered exactly what it promised --- 6.2 gigaflops at 300Mhz. The only people who saw other promises were the ones who bought into the crap they read on CNET or some other piece-of-shit site, and people who have sense have learned to filter those sources out instinctively. In nearly example of supposed "hype" I've seen about the EE, it was the result of a journalist trying to "put the numbers in context" for their clueless readers.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You mean like the Itanic? Shoe's on the other foot now, eh?
I can't wait to put my hands on this baby, buy a really BIG BIG cooler and overclock it!
Of course Sony could block Microsoft from using the cell in the next Xbox.
And no, changing the layout would just bring on a lot of lawsuits. Furthermore, some of the IP on that chip is purportedly owned by Sony. Even with a new layout, Sony would have to permit the sale, something they are not about to do. Playstation is Sony's largest net revenue source.
As for prohibiting MS use of the Cell, Sony certainly has a lot of contracts with IBM regarding Cell. And if one of those contracts prohibited sale of the cell to other console manufacturers, then IBM would be contractually prohibited from selling those chips to Microsoft.
Far more common outright prohibitions are contracts allowing exclusive time periods. For instance, Sony having a 1 year exclusive on the newest revisions of any Cell processor. Considering how infrequently consoles are released, even that relatively minor 1-year exclusivity would forever lock Microsoft out of the best Cell processors. Exclusive time period contracts like that are very common, and there is absolutely nothing illegal about them.
But the biggest reason the next Xbox won't have Cell is because the next Xbox is scheduled to ship before the Cell will be available in quantity. Maybe the Xbox After next will have a cell, but that's easily 4 years from now.
Unless Apple suddenly releases GCC support for the CELL Processor I doubt we'll see this for a Mac any time soon.
As I understand it, the APUs can act semi-independantly but the controlling processor has overall control. If that's true, if the processor wanted to (say) switch to some other process would it have to save all that state to somewhere else before continuing, just as standard processors do now?
As all the APUs have lots of big registers and significant amounts of private memory, wouldn't that be painful?
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
In fact, until you know the Instructions Per Clock, it really isn't anything at all.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Do you have any evidence to support your "faster CPUs make DVD drives noisier" theory?
Like all hype. Stop what you're doing, don't buy the competitor's inferior early tech. Save your money and wait impatiently while you suck in more hype and get higher and higher hopes. The thing that will revolutionize humanity and usher in a new era in our evolution is nearly here, and at the price we will ask, it will be such a bargain, you can hardly wait to spend $100s and unwrap that box so that the revolution doesn't leave you behind. I almost forgot to add, "bow before your corporate masters *evil laughter*"
Over-rated. As a next step I'm sure it will be a big step in capability over the PS2, but with that extra power, it will take time for programmers to exploit it. I've been through enough of these release cycles and $1000s of dollars to really not care any more. It won't live up to the promised hype. It would be cool if I was wrong. But I think I'll let someone else be the early adopter this time.
It is highly likely that Sony will create a custom version of the PS3 hardare for its dev kit (as it did with PSX and PS2). If for some strange reason it decides to use an off the shelf system for an early dev kit, it would likely be the CELL-BASED WORKSTATIONS SOON AVAILABLE FROM IBM.
I diagnose you with incurable stupidity. You can go now.
Shoo!
and I bet it still wouldn't be able to run Longhorn.
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
I dont think anyone is realising the true potential of these chips, all they are seing is 4.6 ghz power chip and forgetting the multiple stream processors.
Does anyone realise that the theoretical performance of this chip (one) is over 250 gigaflops!!!!?
and there is supposedly 4 (or at least 2?) in a ps3 plus "GPU" (possibly with some traditional parts being taken over by the cell chip)
SO one cell chip == 5* 6800 chips == about 40 or 50 high end pentium/athlon systems in theoretical performance, and even if only half of that can be utilised in real use, thats still 125 gigaflops!!!!!
With four of these chips you have a top 500 supercomputer in a box!!!!
watch "the money masters" on google video
as Mr. T would say.
How about some actual SPECint and SPECfp?
Oh, nothing like that was released? Hmm. makes you wonder. Sort of like the Itanium flop where the excuse, going on for about 10 years now, is that the compiler isn't quite optimised yet.
Any nerd over 15 ought to have heard far to many claims of "revolutionary cpu design" to know better.
Except that it's by any reasonably useful benchmark. And it's not for any games.
Nuff said. I dunno how Microsoft and Nintendo will be able to compete...
Not only that, but quite a few different companies in addition as well. So no, I dont think this is some goofyhype machine. IBM doesn't act that way.
Apple will probably be the first true PC to actually start using it, and then Microsoft will need to port their OS to compete. Makers like Dell and such will probably go out of business as an entire industry will be turned completely upside down. It's that revolutionary.
That which is written on product labels, sounds profound.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Modern Intel and AMD proccessors are essentially RISC proccessors with a few extra special bits and peices for multimedia crap (mmx, sse, sse2, etc) added on.
They haven't realy been coupled to the ISA since the Pentium Pro days.
I keep looking at this architecture, and although I have absolutely no real qualifications to say why, it keeps jumping out at me.
This thing looks like the architecture is designed with a jump to quantum computing in mind. The methods just . . . bring that to mind.
Which doesn't particularly make sense. Quantum computing is massively efficient at certain specialized problems like searches and of course encryption. I suppose a pathfinding engine with that capability would be extraordinary too, but by and large gaming doesn't have a lot that quantum computing would help all that much with. Perhaps someone smarter than I can explain why this is a spectacularly stupid.
Because it *looks* like something that's designed with that capability in mind. A least to me.
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
We all know how much hype surrounded Transmeta.
CELL is a Multi-Core Architecture
Contains 8 SPUs each containing a 128 entry 128-bit register file and 256KB Local Store
From your article and the origional it seems there are 8 Synergistic Processing Units/Elements and 1 Power Processor core.
How does s Synergistic Processing Unit differ from a CPU core used in most multicore processors. I'm assuming a SPU doesn't do as much as a CPU, but does anyone know more specifics? Are there benifits other than price for using multiple SPUs and a single CPU rather than multiple CPU cores?
The version of Cell announced today contains eight 64-bit floating point processors.
One way they could easily cut the die size and therefore costs down is by releasing 2 or 4 cell versions.
To run the latest near-4GHz CPU's from intel, you need to mount a whopping great water cooling system to handle the heat.
Now Sony wants to put 3 or 4 x 4.6GHz CPU's into a single small form factor box?
I seem to remember how loudly the Sony fanboys complained about the noise coming from the XBox... this will be amusing. Will it ship with it's own refrigerator?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Since you seem to have absolutely no real grasp of what the things you're reciting actually mean, let's dumb it down for you.
The PS2 was, in car terms: a dragster. Fast in a straight line, but can't turn corners very well. Great for accessing memory sequentially - absolute shit when you needed to be agile and jump around in memory. You know, random access.
I've a feeling the PS3 is going to be the same. Sony sound like they're building a car to take the land speed record. It might be amazingly fast - but as soon as you try to do any actual logic (jumping around in memory or testing the results of operations before deciding what to do next) - it will fall down and be incredibly slow.
If the race you're trying to run has a long enough straight (eg: throwing lots and lots of polygons onto screen one after another), the PS3 will probably do very, very well. But if you're trying to turn lots of corners (ie: doing logic like AI), the PS3 will probably suck just like the PS2 did.
And then you have the nightmare of trying to program the damn thing. It's going to be very inflexible. Programmers are going to spend most of their time caring about what the 64-bit PowerPC is doing. Cell, smell - who cares. Make it draw graphics or do video postprocessing or something. Cells certainly aren't going to be good at running tasks that are important and advance gaming - such as AI.
I mean: look at the examples you give. They're all video processing. Who cares?
Oh, great. Future comparisons of computing capability will be based on SPUs. "Hey, I got the new 12-SPU chip in my computer. How much SPU is in your computer?"
My computer has so many SPUs that I need to wear goggles and a raincoat just to run a spreadsheet.
In Soviet Russia, your computer SPUs on YOU!!
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
No, its more like the PowerPC hype twelve (?) years ago, remember "twice the performance at half the price"
Nature's HarmonicSIMULTANEOUS 4-Day Time Cell
Believers are ignorant of Cell Creation
and will be destroyed by their own word.
All Creation occurs between Opposites.
On Earth between opposite hemispheres,
and for humans, opposites sexes. The 2
opposite sexes equate to 2 separate Cells,
as if dice of femininity and masculinity -
equating Human Life to a Crap-Shoot
chance of exciting lifetime possibilities.
I have demonstrated absolute proof
of "Cellular Creation", through its
attributes of 4 simultaneous 24 hour
days within a single rotation of Earth.
I have $10,000.00 that I will
wager that Cellism transcends
and disproves Theism Creation.
You ignorant dumbass.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Well - let's think about what you are saying. Intel owns the PC CPU market. But everytime they try to get anything else, they get their butts spanked. Remember Intel's graphics? Or their peripherals? Yes, they have chipsets, but their hold is very weak at this point.
The reason that Intel is bashed is cause they have owned x86, and rather than take x86 to the next level, they simply created a marketing chip (the P4, in case you weren't aware). They have become a giant turtle. AMD has gone in and totally flanked Intel. They are the ones doing the more creative implementations, by showing what you can do with x86 - taking x86 to the next level even though it is Intel's turf.
That is why AMD gets kudos while Intel gets bashed.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
you're right that frequency measures can't be directly compared, but in many cases you can order the effectiveness of each clock cycle. in this case, not only is the cell supposed to have a high clock, but it should do more per cycle than other chips.
Not Sony, Toshiba, and IBM...
That is confusing when you are posting about chip makers...I would definitely consider STI patents open for critism!
I was at the Cell event today, and quoted in some of the news stories. I also have the ISSCC technical papers.
The PowerPC core in the Cell prototype chip is NOT a Power5, as speculated here. According to IBM, this core was designed from scratch for this application. One critical difference is that the new pipeline executes instructions in strict program order rather than reordering instructions to improve throughput as is done with Power5.
Also, IBM has not described the core as "simultaneous multithreaded", just "multithreaded." I presume from this that the multithreading is coarse-grained-- only one thread is active at a time, unlike Power5 which can execute instructions from two different threads in the same cycle.
The logic design for the Cell CPU was optimized for higher clock speeds in a given process than Power5 can achieve. This is a good tradeoff for more linear multimedia algorithms, but reduces effective throughput on other types of code.
I think it's reasonable to suppose that if Apple were interested in using the Cell architecture, it would prefer to use a version of the design that includes a Power5 core in place of the one in the Cell prototype.
. png
Cut an 80x80 hole in the top plastic about the middle of the unit, facing upwards. Mount a lo-flow panaflo over the hole, facing up. Wire the panaflo to an external 9v wall wart. Cut the wire to the original fan. For an added bonus, undervolt the panaflo to 6 volts, and add an undervolted rotary fan into the HDD drive bay. This should be silent overall and have a great airflow.
The default internal fan is a 6v 50mm screamer, narrow and loud. Ultimately it moves less air than any undervolted panaflo. Plus it is pretty terribly positioned. A fan on top of your case may prevent you from stacking other equipment on top, but it is perfect for sucking heat off of the gargantuan main heat sink, and gives the fan enough space that the blades don't make that choppy noise. Thanks to a ludicrous heat sink the PS2 doesn't really require that much cooling, though it does require some. It is usually about 20 minutes before a PS2 with no fan will overheat, while a mostly symbolic fan is usually enough.
Of course, the PS2's are engineered to work in hot climates, so if you're near the sahara you may want to run your fan faster. But overall the systems don't need to be noisy.
The ______ Agenda
Why doesn't Intel make a new kind of processor which would damn fast. Skip with the backwards-compatibleness in the design itself, and in the instruction set. Make the backwards compatibleness appear with emulation, like Transmeta. The whole thing'll still probably be faster than hauling that age-old design along.
There are some problems with using the Cell as a Linux chip. First and foremost, the Cell is a much "dumber" processor than anything that has been on the market for the past 10 years - for instance, it uses the OS (or the application) to manage each core's cache. (Most modern CPU's try to hide the complexity of their internal implementation from software - the Cell, however, requires programs to explicitly use all of its hardware internals) Modifying the Linux kernel so that it can manage nine cache banks while maintaining both good security and reasonable performance will be an interesting research project - and it won't be done in one day.
Add to it the fact that Linux is really designed as a general-purpose OS for general-purpose hardware. Implementing NUMA took years of work from SGI and IBM. I imagine that adding efficient support for the Cell's bizarre asymmetric 9-core design (keeping each core fed, not overloading the Cell's internal bus, etc.) will be a multi-year chore. Then, all the applications (or at least all the major libraries) will have to be rewritten to take advantage of the Cell's design. And even then, gcc won't produce efficient code for it -- you really need a good compiler to take advantage of the Cell, and gcc's main focus is portability, not performance...
I can see something like a PS3 using the Cell -- after all, all the games are hand-coded for the processor, and there isn't much of an OS. I can see IBM using the cell as addon accelerator cards for its AIX systems, since it controls the entire AIX stack. I don't see Linux being able to take good advantage of a Cell system for a while.
Don't forget Toshiba, the owner of one of the top music label, EMI. This is their initial phase to produce DRM electronics and/or computers.
IBM's helping them both also...
Slides from "Cell" presentation available; http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0208/kaiga i153.htm
This die size is just huge for a PS3 component on current process technology. People are commenting on this in the thread but the significance really hasn't sunk in. This is about 2x the die size of a current x86 microprocessor on the same technology. It's great that they can squeeze in 8 cores, but being able to manufacture this at a reasonable cost is very tough.
Also, the frequency of 4+ GHz is too high to have a reasonable power level for a PS3. The current trend of frequency stalling is there for a reason, and I don't see how they are going to have a reasonable power level at that frequency, SOI or not. The massive GFlop rating is awesome, but that has to be assuming all the cores are fired up and that means high power.
Look for a big high power PS3 unit that's $500 while Sony takes a loss unless they drop the specs down from this prototype.
We'll see. IBM has historically been very smart (and sometimes downright ruthless) when it comes intellectual property issues. Their IP attorneys aren't referred to as "The Nazgul" for nothing...
I'm afraid I don't follow--are you saying that they come from R'lyeh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazgul
Large chunks of the integer ALU of the P4 operate at double the clock frequency which is up to 7.2Ghz.... so Cell is "slower" (no not really).
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Now I can compile my Gentoo in a week!
intel is scrambleing to update there sh**y chips
case in point Itinium2-dualcore>billion transistors
there runing out of room to increase performance..
cell300 million
Facts:
1. Cells are processor architectures
2. Cells run code ALL the time
3. The purpose of the Cell is to flip out and kill x86
If you don't believe that Cells have REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or they overheat and melt your PSU!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.
Cells are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants. I can't believe it sometimes, but I feel it inside my heart. These things are totally awesome and that's a fact. Cells are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. I can't wait to start compiling next year. I love Cells with all of my body (including my pee pee).
keep buying intels processors, with each new generation you only get a modest gain in performance .... ..
but now intel's runing scared....
change all there projections,
dual-core p4 tomorrow....just wait..they say...fuck them....and your i64 p5 p6 p4ee pm dual-pm
because after that theres no room to grow...
intel been selling you junk for ten years...
they bought into that they could actually use the 6.2gflops meaningfully.
that's exactly what happening now also, journalists trying to put inflated numbers into context in a fashion "what would they do vs. desktop" and they come up on top, while in reality they most likely won't. the hype is exact clone of the hype before ps2 - some journalists never learn(or didn't actually even try ps2 for a desktop. it does shittily as a desktop.).
and on top of it it's going to be hard to program for, not magically easy like blachford makes it out to be - and it's all let up to the programmer!
my point.. just wait for the thing to be REALITY and benchmarkable(as in real world performance, with real production) before salivating over how it will change the face of computing(and at the same time be record cheap somehow despite huge die size).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
IT may be alittle too far-fetched but the cell processor or it's successor can be a real GPU-killer. May be we will live without 3D videocard in the near future and return of the software rendering. The GPU have performance more then two order of magnitude of contemporary CPU, all due to highly vectorized and paralellized architecture. But if you look at the cell processor architecture you will see it's very similar to GPU. What cell is in fact is some kinde of generalization of GPU architectuire so it could run any kinde of code, not only "per-pixel/vertex", with both read and write dependancy (modern GPU can run only read-dependant shader code). More than that, cell architecture is very well suited for voxel-based rendering. So, not only we could possible be get rid of 3d cards, but voxel rendereds could outperform polygon-based rendereds again (he, he, good buy DirectX)
the xbox2 will have four power4 processors.
win NT 4.0 before sevice pack 3
runs naitive on powerpc.....
winXP=NT5.o
sevice pack 3 for nt4.o moved the (gui,derectX,and other bullshit closer to the kernel to improve perform, but caused instability) now that intel processor are faster there moving that shit back out aka Longhorn...
Will we be able to use the cell processor as a frying pan, like with the P4?
they bought into that they could actually use the 6.2gflops meaningfully.
The EE wasn't some magic architecture that could only do 6.2 gigaflops on a single benchmark. It was a simple vector architecture. Developers knew that. If they thought they could get 6.2 gigaflops out of it, but they didn't know how to program vector architectures, then whose fault is that? I don't see anybody complaining about the benchmarks published for things like the Earth Simulator, because it's pretty hard to get close to peak on that thing too!
With regards to what Blachford said --- I refuse to attribute journalistic hype to IBM and Sony. It's the journalists making far out claims, not IBM. A lot of people are legitimately excited about the thing, not because they believe they can actually get 256gigaflops running Quake III, but because they see the 256gigaflops peak, and salivate at the real numbers they could post in their apps.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Does anyone know how many stages the pipeline of Cell is? Or is that an improper way of looking at it? It seems like with a speed that high, the pipeline must be many stages deep. The P4 scaled so high because of it's deep pipeline, but that introduces other problems. I think that's essentially why they could put hyperthreading in. Your processor was sitting idle or running NOPS for half of its instructions. In the P4, they used Rambus because the bandwidth and latency masked the problems with having such a deep pipeline. Is this the same situation? I haven't found any of these sorts of stats, and I am not a microprocessor engineer, but it would be interesting to know. Anyone?
Why not completely design the lot, run OpenSource on it because that's more portable, market to servers as they run samey applications,
and then go on from that.
I guess no one wants to take on x86; i.e. ARM.
A blog I run for the wealth
Would a better comparision would be the PPC 615?
Imagine a beowolf cluster of these! Legit comment actually.
No oooe? Build a really, really good compiler.
Have an app originally compiled inefficiently? Run code-reorganizing tool on it.
Not sure that any of the latter tools exist today, but it's something I've been pondering. Imagine, on a PC, replacing a bunch of SISD instructions with the latest SIMD equivalent.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!! no really! FUCK ME!!!!
The first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague about how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz.
Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), falling a wee bit short of marketing hyperbole calling it a "supercomputer on a chip." The slowest machine on the current list of the Top 500 supercomputers can do 851 gigaflops.
The chip will have 2.5MB of on-chip memory and have the ability to shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to 100 gigabytes per second, using XDR and FlexIO interface technology licensed from Rambus.
"One of the key messages you hear from the architects of next-generation chips is that their performance is being limited by off-chip bandwidth," said Rich Warmke, product marketing manager at Rambus. "We've really licked that with Cell. One hundred gigabytes per second is really unprecedented in the industry."
The chip will have 234 million transistors, measure 221mm square and be produced using advanced 90-nanometer chipmaking processes. Peter Glaskowsky, a consultant at research company The Envisioneering Group, said he expects Cell production to shift to a 65-nanometer process, however, as IBM introduces the chipmaking technology later this year.
I have so got a boner right now. I want 2 of these.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It is a radeon/geforce competitor. Or something like that.
The cell processor is only really fast when the spus are in use, which means 32-bit non-branching floating-point arithmatic. For anything involving integer math, flow control, or uneven memory access, the SPUs defer to the main processor. I'm sure IBM put a decent processor in there, but it doesn't sound like it's anything revolutionary, and there's only the one.
What does this get you? -- A processor that is really good at decoding mpeg, rendering graphics, maybe approximating the physics of flying dragons. It is not a fast general purpose processor. Operating systems, word processors, databases, these are all integer tasks, and much more-so they are branch tasks. Scientific computation - this requires double-precision floating point. Photoshop is about the only piece of non-multimedia software that might be able to take advantage of this.
The end result is that this will likely be a great chip for set-top boxes of all sorts, maybe even for video-editing workstations. A G5/pentium replacement it isn't; that's a different ball game.
Good point. But Sony has another ace up their sleeve: while the PS3 might or might not offer internal CPU upgrades, the Cell programming model is meant to scale well for networks/clusters of Cell-enabled devices. Thus, you should be able to harness the cpu power of other Cell-devices in your home (another PS3, a settop box or even the new Sony TV).
I'd expect the "Flight Simulator-with-real-cockpit" crowd to go for a solution based on multiple PS3: every box handles part of the IO (tons of buttons&blinkenlights) and some 2D graphics (instrument panels, MFDs). The remaining CPU capacity is pooled towards rendering the outside view(s).
I hear you though. The Power5 is designed to handle large multi-process loads. This new Cell architecture, or at least this particular Cell chip, is designed for real time processing of large piles of data.
I'm not reliving computer architecture class... I'm not reliving computer architecture class... (open's eyes) ... Whew
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
From the Intel days, the press and the populace has been hypnotized into thinking "processing power=Ghz. End of story". The fact is if the cell specs are more than just hype:
1) 64 bit architecture
2) 8 of those on a chip
3) you can gang Cells together via boradband
A cell running just 1Ghz would easily blow the pantaloons off anything we've got in our house today!
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
I have this feeling that Apple will announce that they will switch to the Cell CPU some time later this year, and the first machines to use the Cell CPU will be announced at MacWorld in January 2006 (probably both Power Macintosh and iMac models).
It's meaningless to say that 'They say it's temperature is between 40C and 52C.'
With the proper cooling, the facking thing could dissipate a 1000 Watts and it could still be 'at 40C'.
And don't go getting all dewy eyed about 60nm processes. 65nm processes leak like a farking sieve. They waste as much power in leakage currunt as they use to operate.
AND power dissipation scales as the square or the operating frequency. So ramping up beyond 4GHz is headig for solar thermal issues.
It gives you something which no other processor does. Being different from mainstream processors is why it is ideal for Linux IMO. Not the industry driven linux, but the geeky linux.
... and you can just treat the SPUs as co-processors for specialized tasks. Video encoding, number crunching etc. This all can be done long before gcc and the linux threading model have evolved to the point you can use them in a more general purpose way.
The central core can run Linux fast enough
234M transistors @ 90nm is actually about as big as most graphics processors are. They tend to be 150M-200M @ 110nm or 130nm. I dont see it being terribly difficult to fab really
Graphics chips run well below 1GHz. Clocked at over 4 GHz, the Cell processor would have significantly lower yields. That's where the high cost really comes from.
When can I get a compiler? And a language that will compile to take advantage of the chips features? And an emulator of some sort.... and maybe a few boards.
sorry if someone else has posted this already.
Go Gusties
Will somebody please think of the COMPILERS??!!