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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."
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
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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
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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.
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?
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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.
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.
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Thing is, the next Xbox will be using a PowerPC 970. So it will share a common ancestor (POWER) with the Cell.
I wonder, how compatible are the two CPUs' instruction sets? Will Microsoft be able to drop a Cell into a future revision of the Xbox2 and maintain backward compatibility? Could someone theoretically hack a PlayStation3 to run Xbox2 games?
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.
The second is that it's STARTING at 4ghz. It's one thing to say a chip can scale and run at some speed (again, I'm looking at you Intel), but to debut it running faster than the fastest mass produced CPU in the world is something all together different.
Cell should be quite formidable, and I think it will be quite interesting to see what comes of it. I've held the opinion for a few years that computers would move to having a couple of CPUs each running their own task (like in Cell), with one main (quite possibly slower) CPU controlling them all and running the OS (traffic cop, again like in the Cell). While the individual processing units are not general purpose (they are more vector oriented), it should still be interesting to see what comes of this. After all, most things people use high-end CPUs for are (or can be) vector ops, right? Compression, 3D, etc. Wordprocessing and spreadsheets don't tend to need much power. A large generalization, I know, but still... the introduction of the Cell (especiall the way it should be able to "group" its self with other Cell processors in your house) should prove quite interesting even if it turned out to be a failure (which I SERIOUSLY doubt.)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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!!!
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.
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.
As the grandparent post said, MHZ != performance.
A good analogy tell computer illiterate people is MHZ is kinda like the RPM an engine will do. Higher RPM doesn't necessarily mean higher speed.
Also, its a RISC design. it may well do LESS in each clock cycle than x86.
And aren't we close to the theoretical limit transistors can switch at? If the cell processor starts at such a high clock rate it won't have as much headroom for improvement.
Here's what this 4.6GHz number tells me. First, it tells me that either the presenter at ISSCC was ridiculously vague or that the journalist is an idiot. Call me cynical, but I doubt that even the mighty Sony has been able to clock a supposed POWER4 or POWER5 core to around double its previous frequency. So it could be a new design. If this is the case, the clockspeed tells me that the core is either extremely simple or has more pipeline stages than Prescott. We've been through this before, and that wouldn't be good. For the record, I kind of doubt that scenario is accurate.
Last I heard, the 4.6GHz number was actually the tested clock frequency of the SRAM on the chip. That's impressive and all, but it hardly begins to indicate performance of the SRAM itself. For all we know, it could run at 4.6GHz but only with 20 cycles of latency.
The short version? We need more details. Try not to get caught up in the hype machine for once.
Pardon my naivete, but if they go from a 90nm process to a 60nm process for actual production, shouldn't that make this a ~150mm~2 chip size? And isn't cost really a function of yields (which go down with increasing area), not "a direct function of area"? We have yet to see what kind of yields IBM can achieve with the final process -- until then, nobody can really speculate on cost.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If you can help clarify some of this for me, thanks.
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They already tried this for the PS2.
engineering convention turned to pr feeder?
yes. look at the specs. they're just that: SPECS aka numbers on paper, nothing more than that. emotion engine was also bunch of pretty theoretical numbers.
then they're even admitting that it's to the programmer to choose how the units will be used. it's going to be a huge pain.
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.
You weren't supposed to switch back to real mode, which was obsolete. They underestimated the PC industry's fixation on backwards compatibility and overestimated the ability of Microsoft and other software vendors to produce advanced operating systems. It was a decent chip, but it wasn't what most of their customers wanted.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
actually according to the reports ive read, the cell is supposed to debut in servers long before ps3 arrives, and i remember marketing estimates of 16 terraflops for a 1 rack server!!!!!!
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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.
I think in this case we're talking handwritten asm for the graphics/sound that is re-used in a higher level lang.
;-)
Almost like... the way PS2 programs are developed
Though yeah, lack of oooe [out of order execution] means that as a general purpose CPU the thing will suck bad [because as you translate from HL to opcodes [risc in this case] there are often many cases of parallelisms and renames you can exploit].
Tom
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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.
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