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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.
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.
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.
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"