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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
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
If you can help clarify some of this for me, thanks.
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They already tried this for the PS2.
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.