Ars Technica's Hannibal on IBM's Cell

endersdouble writes "Ars Technica's Jon "Hannibal" Stokes, known for his many articles on CPU technology, has posted a new article on IBM's new Cell processor. This one is the first part of a series, and covers the processor's approach to caching and control logic. Good read."

Comments

The real value of the x86

[argoff]

Is that the 386 instruction set and arcitecture is so non proprietary. What made it so popular certainly wasn't that it was better. If I had the dough, I can literally make one and my own fab without asking a single soul. Alot of times it seems companies try to gather into consortiums to mimic the same effect and gather market momentum, but these are doomed to failure because the more valuable the technology becomes - the greater the pressure to diferentiate and fence off some "teritory" for themselves. We saw this happen first hand with UNIX, where all the flavors would constantly try to group under these unified standards - and they made little progress until Linux came along. The CPU world needs somthing similar to protect people from patent harassment. for design, cores, and fabrication.

Re:Workstation?

[PurpleFloyd]

The Cell workstation in question is not a home/office computer; not running Linux because it's hard to install or a scanner won't work is not an issue. The workstation is closer to a Sun or SGI system - very expensive, and faster than almost anything in the x86 world.

The target market is not home users but rather scientists, animators, engineers, and others who need raw power and aren't concerned with the fact that Word won't work on it; many customers will probably have a cheap PC sitting next to it for office tasks, freeing up the workstation to do nothing but grind through computations. In this world, various unicies are the only serious choice; SGIs run IRIX or Linux, Suns run Solaris or Linux, and IBMs run AIX or Linux.

Take into account IBM's commitment to Linux, and the fact that many of their customers already use it, and it's almost certain that Linux will be a major OS choice for Cell workstation customers, particularly those working in a mixed-architecture environment. While it's likely to run AIX and a Windows port is possible, it's almost certain that a majority of Cell workstations will be running Linux.