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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."
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 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.
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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.
The feature sizes are 90 nm and the wafers are 300 mm in diameter.
"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.
As usual, media is making a bigger deal out of this than what it really is worth. After looking at the details in the articles linked above, Cell looks to me like a combination of two well known technologies: SIMD units integrated with a microprocessor and MIMD geometry engines that is used in all modern GPUs. STI team must have figured out that moving the geometry engines from the graphics coprocessor to the main CPU may provide performance benefits in terms of processing 3D data structures. As for the 4+ GHz clock speed, this is more likely the pipeline clock speed for the SPEs and the embedded PPC core on this device would probably run from a much slower (2.4GHz?) clock. Current Intel P4 processors use 1.5X core clock in some parts of the floating point unit, so you should consider a 3.8GHz P4 to be a "5.7GHz" chip to make a fair comparison to the speculated clock speeds for the cell chip.
The GHz figures mean nothing at all in terms of performance expectations unless you are comparing within the same processor family.
4GHz cell != 4GHz P4 != 4GHz Opteron != 4GHz G5
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Sure, it doesn't serve up a site or anything
... corporate grade relational databases serving up data to a few dozen concurrent users for example, or multivariant calculus and diff/equations - and I'm looking for all the horsepower I can get.
Amazing how fast those i386 processors were at doing absolutely nothing at all.
Assign your Linux box a task or two and all of a sudden faster CPU's become appealing.
My C=64 was a bad motherfucker, right up until the point I wanted to do some serious number crunching on it (or play games.) The minute I decide that there's more to life than interacting with the operating system on an 80x25 character wide CUI
Plus I bet it plays a mean game of Doom III.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Any links to back that up? The only confirmed unit loss consoles I know of are the Xbox and the dreamcast. Everything else (to my knowledge) has been profitable. I looked around and the only sites that are claiming that the PSP is sold at a loss are 1up.com and some people on the chat forums. I also found a bunch of posts claiming that Sony expects to not sell the hardware at a loss. Perhaps the initial allocation was sold cheap to create buzz?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Hey man, if $34 Billion in revenue is getting your butt spanked, then line me up and get the paddle.
As for graphics, those have been a huge success, to the point that nVidia and ATi began copying the idea. Intel's integrated chipsets are a huge hit with business. They keep costs and space down, and high performance grapihcs aren't necessary for office work. The integrated low-end graphics chip is getting to be quite popular.
Networking would be another huge non-processor area that they excell in. If you ask me what kind of NIC I want in a server, Windows, Linux, BSD, whatever, the answer is Intel. Nobody else I know makes cards of the same quality. 3com used to, but not anymore.
Now the x86-64 thing is an interesting one to pick on, because the reverse is true. AMD was being the uninnovative one. They decided that innovation, in this case, was unnecessary and counter productive. They decided to just whack on 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, as was done with the 32-bit conversion years ago, and call it good. It offered nothing new in terms of ISA, but that meant backward compatibility.
Intel tried to be radical. EPIC is a neat idea that's been messed with for years and never made practical. You have the compiler do all the work of deciding what runs in parallel, rather than the chip. Makes for helaciously complex assembly, but that's ok, you just need a good compiler, and Intel makes the best.
Well, total non-starter in the desktop market, that's gone to x86-64 and it's not changing. However seems to be working in the high end computation market. We just got in 2 racks of SGI Itanium coputers for one of the research labs. From what I hear, they are badass number crunchers.
Now if you want to talk some major failures, let's have a look at AMD's motherboard situation. When the Athlon came out it was abysmal. AMD couldn't produce a reasonable chipset to support their own processors. It was slow and incomplete, and couldn't deal with basics like AGP 2x. VIA had a full featured chipset, that was full of bugs and couldn't handle hardware like the GeForce in many configurations. ACPI problems plauged all boards.
Now the point here isn't to try and say Intel's better than AMD. The point is, both companies have hits and misses. Some products can be both a hit in one way, and a miss in another. However there's a lot of fanboyism about AMD and hate towards Intel and its not productive.
You should pick your platform based off of informed choices about what performs better for you, and gives you that performance at the best price. If you find yourself having to justify it by attacking the other company, you probably made it for the wrong reasons.
This goes extra for doublespeak like hating on Intel for focusing on MHz, then hating on them again when someone else does so.
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.