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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."
1st post !!!
Did he eat it?
www.beefstormposse.com
go ahead and hate me
I never got tired of the myriad ways Hannibal, Face and the gang could trick B.A. onto that airplane. Every damn time!
Comedy gold.
Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that, if successful, this processor will eclipse the PowerPC on the Mac in the next few years?
I want 2 of them, yesterday.
... on cell... likely?
Aside from my own (competent) review of the cell processor, the article possibly the most insightful and technically nicely balanced articles posted on slashdot in a long while!
I'll cover more of the Cell's basic architecture, including the mysterious 64-bit POWERPC core that forms the "brains" of this design.
Looking forward to that... I think that many people will be moving to Mac
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Let's get into the habit of doing this, please.
Part II is up as well.
MOD DOWN MOD DOWN. Above post seems to be child porn...don't click on it!
.. made of risc components.
I am also against saving humans with stem cells or helping parents to have children, because I am a "pro-life" nut.
Works okay for me, I don't know what you're smoking.
" Last fall, IBM and Sony said they were developing a workstation based on Cell chips, which is the first product IBM will ship based on Cell."
Regardless if this is the first product shipped or not, a workstation is coming. I can't see it running anything but linux. Given the mass market targeting of the cell, I hope Sony makes a strong go at grabbing the market with cheap hardware, rather than trying to milk the high-end content creation market first.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Hello Bloggers! I am a second year graduate student at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles. For my masters thesis project, I am researching the uses and gratifications of bloggers - basically, why people go to blogs: for content gratifications (information/education/learning), social gratifications (interactions/chatting), or process gratifications (search engines/surfing). I would really appreciate your assistance with this project. Please take a minute to check out the survey link - http://surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=73418829968. It takes less than 2 minutes! And feel free to pass it along to all the bloggers you know and/or post the link on your blogs. Thanks so much!
Beautiful as it is as a gaming CPU, I still am having trouble seeing how this thing would work in a PC of any sort. The only customers the Cell has so far-- Sony-- are talking about the stream processing units being directly coded for by the programmer. But general PC programmers still haven't accepted Altivec that well despite it being available, easy to use and useful, how are they going to react to "rewrite your program to use SPEs"?. Meanwhile if the programmer does directly code for the SPEs then that's all well and good in a video game system, but it's yet to be explained to me how on earth the SPE works in a time-sharing operating system. Specifically, who gets to use it, when, and what they do with the onboard SPE memory during a context switch? These are not trivial issues.
e.g. 234 M transistors (!) That's why I don't think this will be replacing the G5 any time soon. The die size (at the current prototype's 90nm) is over 200 mm2.
It'll have to get a fair bit smaller/cheaper before the PS3 can use it without major subsidies, and I don't know why they think general consumer devices will want it. God knows how much power it dissipates with all 8 SPEs clocking over at 4 GHz...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Parent post should not be modded down. It should be REMOVED by Slashdot editors and the IP of a sender should be reported to relevant authorities. I don't want to go to jail because I clicked it and downloaded child pornography on my fucking WORK COMPUTER for christ's sake! REMOVE THIS POST IMMEDIATELY.
Basically, the answer is no.
Thank god. I've enjoyed his articles in the past, and if experience is any indication, I will have the false impression that I understand this stuff in a nontrivial way for up to three hours. This is not meant to rag on Hannibal, BTW.
The Wikimedia Foundation has an interesting piece on how they're planning on using the Cell processor to improve Wikipedia in the future.
YOur moms cunt tastes like a breezy sunday afternoon barefoot o n the cool grass and sunshine pouring down like golden angel piss
Why is this under the header games? I know nothing about the processor, by the way.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
It is interesting to note that he uses the same terminologies and conclusions that he lambasted another author for. Wow. Hannibal is a hypocrite.
Specific Example: Locally Addressable Memory vs. Cache.
Granted, he may simply have not had access to the information at that time (doubtful, since the article he critiqued was gleaned from the patent application), but he was vicious in his dissection of the article. Does anyone know if he ever appologized for being a moron towards Nicholas Blachford?
WIth a name like that, I expect to see pictures of him eating those Cell processors, and describing how they taste.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
...clicking on this link also attempts to install a trojan (SARC's name: ByteVerify). I agree: this link should be removed and the poster's IP should be reported to the relevant authorities.
Although the article (which is quite clear) indicates that the AltiVec architecture is closer to G4 than G5, won't the speed increase of having 8 fully-parallel processors (9 if you count the main CPU) more than make up for the issues associated with the loss of the G5's advanced features? It seems to me that this is a natural for Apple - it will give them a 5x - 10x performance boost over anything that's on the drawing boards over at Intel.
Even so, I doubt we'd see Cell-based Macs until at least 2007 - but wouldn't it be great to run PS3 games on your Mac? (As if that'll ever happen.) But then again, given the Cell architecture, your PS3 could use your Mac to make its games run faster! A whole new reason to have an XServe-based supercomputer...
The one thing I don't understand is how I would code for this thing. As best as I understand it, I now have some instructions for controlling the cache (or LAM, whatever) which sounds cool, but are there any details yet of how I'd write code for this? I'm also disappointed that the article didn't explain how one would use their SIMD instructions if they aren't using any of the existing standards. So I load my vectors with the cache control and ask the processors to ever so kindly add them?
Anybody out there with experience on this architecture or even attended the presentation itself can give us mere coders details? Preferably a website.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
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.
Pattnaik said that if IBM were to publish the detailed monitoring information for end users to access, then the company would feel obliged to maintain backwards compatibility in future iterations, and so they'd be limited in the changes they could make to the scheme.
If I were IBM, I'd publish such specs anyway, alongside letting the press know very loudly and clearly that developers should stick to the recommended API if they want any guarantee of future compatibility. OTOH, I do understand their reasoning for doing this, and I don't completely blame them. Even if they did publish the register information with the very loud and clear warning, people would still complain about lack of backwards compatibility, something of which is meant to be incumbent upon the developer, and not IBM.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
This chip seems insanely powerful. With 8 APU's capable of doing DSP, you would think that some countries would impose export restrictions on the thing. If you remember when the G4 came out Apple advertized that the military didn't want that thing leaving the country. But image a chip with the ability to do some serious SIMD operations? The CIA, NSA and others doing signal processing have to love this chip.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
You've got only yourself to blame for clicking on that link. Don't try to blame anyone else for your problems.
that it runs at 30 watts, about like a Pentium M. And it's 64-bit. Can we say....
Dare I say....
Oh the Hell....
PowerBook G5!
What if it had been a link to goatse? The poor kid would have been scarred for life!
I thought it was funny dude, sorry I don't have mod points.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
As I fully expected, Pattnaik could not discuss a possible workstation-class derivative (read: Apple-oriented derivative) of the POWER5. He also made it clear that he is and has been focused on POWER5 servers only, and any hypothetical workstation-class derivative of the design would be for someone else to discuss.
I'm wondering about the feasibility of such a processor. This design seems to be rather heavily dependent upon the specific design of the OS (namely AIX in this case), and it seems to me that any OS that would want to take advantage of the POWER5 would need some heavy rewrites.
Of course, I could always be wrong on this issue, but I get the impression from the article that server oriented processors (namely Big Iron) and desktop processors are on a diverging path over at IBM. There may be some similarities, but I'm betting that there will be more differences than similarities in future processors.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The initial post is probably a troll, and a good one at that.
Americans bellow on how they are the most free nation on Earth, yet if you violate a cultural taboo (posting pics of underage kids), then all of the sudden these so-called rights to free speech disappear.
I can understand why you don't want to look at the stuff, but why are you imposing your beliefs on others? So what if you like kids? Are you going to have the cops arrest your mom when she parades out the pics of you when you were a toddler crawling around on the floor naked with private parts showing?
America: Land of the hypocrites.
What I find interesting is that the vector processor are restricted to single precision floating point calculations.
This isn't terribly useful for scientific computations (there is the same problem with the GPU): currently the IEEE is working on a standard for 128bit precision floating point calculations!
Of course for 3D, video and sound, 32bit precision is good enough and *if* programmers (a big if) manage to overcome the pain of 'parallel programming' then it could be a big success.
The blurb's title is misleading. The Cell processor is likely to have little to do with the POWER5 arch:
I asked if there's any relationship between POWER5 and the Cell architecture that IBM is working on with Sony. Pattnaik didn't seem to familiar with the details of Cell, and he said that there's no relationship between the two designs. He noted that if they shared some similar characteristics, then it isn't because the two teams are collaborating in any way.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Hmm, not sure what that has to do with PlayStations, but there you go.
Many people think that anything involving naked children is automatically child pornography... but nothing could be further from the truth.
I'm assuming this is on either a non-US server or a free-speech supporting server. Is the only way to take it down to Slashdot it? Does the ends justify the means?
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
But does it run gcc? Or even have a cross-compiler target module? Will gcc become smart enough to emulate some of the SIMD techniques in my regular C++ code, even when I write the same old patterns?
--
make install -not war
I just realized that I read the wrong article. I kept thinking, "That's strange, I see only one part of the article even mentioning Cell technology, and it seems to indicate no relationship to the POWER5 arch. Is the blurb wrong?"
No, it wasn't. Next time you submit a story, you really only need to submit the relevent links.
Thanks. Bastard.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Cradle Semiconductor has been working for a while on a similar technology.
Of course, it's all a matter of scale - TI had a 4 DSP, 1 CPU processor a while ago, but it only made 100 MFLOPS. Cradle's first product has 8 DSPs and 6 CPUs - depending on if you can get your data to properly pipeline through the processors, you can achieve up to 3.6 GFLOPs peak with only a 230 MHz clock.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Who would conceivably have enough money to build microchip fabrication facilities but not enough money to license the powerpc architecture?
"Reverse engineered implementations exist" is not really much of a meaningful strength if you don't own one such reverse engineered implementation already. You say you can potentially build a 386 chip fab, but the thing is you aren't going to build a 386 chip fab, you're going to just keep on buying Intel and AMD chips, the only noteworthy people currently making x86 chips, because if you built a 386 what would you do with it? It's a 386. The ISA has moved on.
With the low performance PPC cpu, I doubt Apple will want these things. Apple has too much interest in the general purpose computer market to care much about something like the cell processor, that is built for a niche market. For Apple, the cell processor will not only be expensive, but also slow. That goes double, since it is harder for Apple to get developers to suddenly switch from Altivec to the cell architecture than it is for Sony to do the same.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I commented on the wrong article.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The above link contains pictures of underage girls in sexually obscene positions. Here is one of the pictures (converted to ASCII format), just in case you do not feel like clicking.
This picture is of a 7 year old girl named Amanda:
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*
g_______________________________________________g
o_/_____\_____________\____________/____\_______o
a|_______|_____________\__________|______|______a
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>_\___|_____o
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>_|__/_____a
t_______/\_|___C_____)/______\_(_____>_|_/______t
s______/_/\|___C_____)_______|_(___>_/__\_______s
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*
Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)
See this story posted by CmdrTaco on March 16, 2001: "Last Saturday a comment was posted here by an anonymous reader that contained text that was copyrighted by the Church of Scientology. They have since followed the DMCA and demanded that we remove the comment. While Slashdot is an open forum and we encourage free discussion and sharing of ideas, our lawyers have advised us that, considering all the details of this case, the comment should come down." So removing comments telling the truth about a cult is all fine and cool, but removing child pornography is suddenly a violation of freedom of speech? Are you seriously thinking that way or are you just trolling?
That's from OSTG's terms of service. They own Slashdot. Free speech bows out before private property. The site belongs to them, and if they do not want these kinds of links here, they are perfectly within their rights to remove them.
And I rather hope they hurry.
Yeah, clicked the wrong link. I hate you, endersdouble, but I don't hate you enough to put you on my foes list.
/. blurbs be simpler? As if they're not already.
Oh, why can't
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
nyud.net is a semi-open content distribution network called CoralCDN that is essentially a distributed web cache. We serve > 10 M requests daily for 100,000s of clients. For more information about this research project, please see:
http://www.coralcdn.org/
Basically, when you see a URL like you reported, it means that the content is actually from (stripping out the .nyud.net:8090):
http://minigirls.biz/
Thus, if you think you've seen evidence of child abuse, you should get in touch with the operators of minigirls.biz.
whois minigirls.biz
Domain Name: MINIGIRLS.BIZ
Domain ID: D8278609-BIZ
Sponsoring Registrar: DIRECT INFORMATION PVT. LTD.,
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 303
Registrant ID: DI_356733
Registrant Name: Michael Pirson
Registrant Organization: Megaaliance Inc
Registrant Address1: 386 West Side St.
Registrant City: Chicago
Registrant State/Province: Il
Registrant Postal Code: 26549
Registrant Country: United States
Registrant Country Code: US
Registrant Phone Number: +91.226370256
Registrant Email: mr.b_m@rambler.ru
Note that CoralCDN does not provide archival storage of content, like google.com's cache or archive.org. Much like a web cache or "content accelerator" at ISPs, CoralCDN only keeps data temporarily in its file caches, either until the data expires or the is evicted (as may occur for unpopular data).
If the origin site is no longer online or the particular content returns some HTTP error message, CoralCDN will only serve the old data for at most a short time (24 hours). Thus, if you believe that a website is making infringing/illegal content available, please direct any notices to that particular website. When that origin site complies with the notice, the content in question will naturally be removed from CoralCDN's caches through purely automated technical means in at most 24 hours.
I hope this answers your questions,
Michael Freedman
If Sony can fit it in a console and sell a hundred million of them in a year, I'm sure Apple can fit it in a Computer and sell a few million of them as well. If you're going to talk about size/heat dissipation/price, that is.
Besides, those slides show that the 64-bit PPC on it has VMX. That's Altivec, baby. Sure, the SPE's don't have the full functionality of VMX but so what.
The biggest issue I see is that the Cell's design requires the programmer to have full control of the machine. Tell an SPE to do something and don't worry about it. There's a lot of "what if"'s in there. Like "What if some other program tells that SPE to do something else?" etc.
I was posting that. Now you've made me look redundant. And repetitive.
Hurd might be an interesting candidate for running on Cell because of the highly threaded design. Hurd servers might be able to swap in and out of cells as they require cycles. It seems a good match; i.e. L4 runs in the main core, and various translators and other processes run on the cells. If a cell could be programmed to run the filesystem, for instance, it would totally free up the core for other business.
Because the PS/3 will have a highly fixed hardware set, implementing a minimal driver set might be feasible given enough reverse-engineering effort.
I'm not saying that L4/Hurd will kick the nuts off of Linux on an Opteron, I'm just noting that it might be pretty cool to experiment with Hurd on Cell technology. The L4/Hurd team is real close to getting the last peices in place to compile Mach based Hurd under L4, and if you ever tried Debian GNU/Hurd, you know its pretty near feature-complete and a pretty neat system to run. The next task for L4/Hurd is a driver infrastructure, and it might be wise to look at what Cell is bringing to the table before it gets too far along. Know what I mean.
Clickety Click
In part II, he writes:
"Finally, before signing off, I should clarify my earlier remarks to the effect that I don't think that Apple will use this CPU. I originally based this assessment on the fact that I knew that the SPUs would not use VMX/Altivec. However, the PPC core does have a VMX unit. Nonetheless, I expect this VMX to be very simple, and roughly comparable to the Altivec unit o the first G4. Everything on this processor is stripped down to the bare minimum, so don't expect a ton of VMX performance out of it, and definitely not anything comparable to the G5. Furthermore, any Altivec code written for the new G4 or G5 would have to be completely reoptimized due to inorder nature of the PPC core's issue.
So the short answer is, Apple's use of this chip is within the realm of concievability, but it's extremely unlikely in the short- and medium-term. Apple is just too heavily invested in Altivec, and this processor is going to be a relative weakling in that department. Sure, it'll pack a major SIMD punch, but that will not be a double-precision Alitvec-type punch."
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2. ars
Amanda certainly has a big dick for a seven year old girl.
Linux on Intel: Think Dead Man Walking and Grid vs. SMP: The Empire Tries Again and Fast, Faster and IBM's PlayStation 3 Processor.
Another article on the Cell design at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/03/cell_analy sis_part_two/ seems to indicate that there is some sort of DRM built in.
Hannibal doesn't say anything about this (that I noticed) - anyone have more info?
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
These anonymous messages were posted by Slashpanda, an obvious and not-very-notable wannabe troll who is best known for annoying the hell out of everyone on Slashdot's hidden Trolltalk forum, where the merits of this "child porn" troll are currently being debated.
This RAM functions in the role of the L1 cache, but the fact that it is under the explicit control of the programmer means that it can be simpler than an L1 cache. The burden of managing the cache has been moved into software, with the result that the cache design has been greatly simplified. There is no tag RAM to search on each access, no prefetch, and none of the other overhead that accompanies a normal L1 cache. The SPEs also move the burden of branch prediction and code scheduling into software, much like a VLIW design.
Why? The reason for the instruction window was to simplify software development.
Of course, I like to play devil's advocate with myself, so I'll answer that question.
The purpose of the Cell processor is to enhance home appliances, which have a greater reliance upon low-latency than they do on precision, accuracy, and performane bandwidth. Thus, one can very safely say that the Cell processor will likely have little purpose in scientific calculations.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
These anonymous messages were posted by Slashpanda, an obvious and not-very-notable wannabe troll who is best known for annoying the hell out of everyone on Slashdot's hidden Trolltalk forum, wherethe merits of this "child porn" troll are currently being debated.
Theseanonymous messages were posted by Slashpanda, an obvious and not-very-notable wannabe troll who is best known for annoying the hell out of everyone on Slashdot's hidden Trolltalk forum, wherethe merits of this "child porn" troll are currently being debated.
The parent (to your post) was joking. Quadras are Motorola 680x0 machines, not PowerPC. You'd have no more luck running OS X on one of those than you would Windows XP.
That page also supplies a Java applet designed to exploit a 2003 IE/Java bug.
The page also attempts to seize control with Javascript.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Hey "never say never", but I don't see Microsoft (xbox2) porting/releasing ANY Windows technology on Sony (ps3) hardware any time soon. The Xbox2/PS3 showdown is going to be the biggest thing since, well, Xbox/PS2.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Right now, it has 4x as many transistors as a G5, runs at twice the clock speed, and likely puts out a hell of a lot more heat than a G5 does.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A proposal for Apple
I don't have an account, but this is an honest idea.
Why doesn't Apple include a Playstation 2 support card into their Macintosh line?
Problem: The OSX platform has almost no games. I own several macs, I love my macs, and I sincerely enjoy OSX. But it has no games, and that will never get better, especially as simpler games migrate to the web and the complex ones bail for the console market. The PC gaming market has essentially peaked.
Solution: Embed (or include as a BTO option) a PS2 chipset to a Macintosh. Run the generated display straight through to the graphical overlay plane. Done.
Everything works. The controllers are trivially converted to use USB. The DVD drive is already there. The display is already there. The USB and Firewire is already there. The harddrive is already there. The "memory cards" are already there.
Reason: The Macintosh game library explodes instantly to encompass something like 3,000 PS1 and PS2 games. With no need for emulation, the games are guaranteed to work out of the box and provide the Apple ease of use everyone loves. Sony increases their marketshare, Apple gets a viable expanding game library, and users get a vastly better gaming experience on OSX for maybe $40 of parts and engineering.
Why won't this work?
Why are you opening the website when there are dozens of posts indiciating the type of material contained within?
Fucking sick prevert!
Grandparent said nothing about Slashdot's or OSTG's right to run their own site as they see fit. Not exactly sure where you think you are going with this, it has nothing to do with what he said.
Grandparent was talking about Slashdotters constantly preach on about censorship being a bad thing and how "information wants to be free". The replies to the child porn obviously show a departure from this philosophy and he was pointing this out.
The difference is that instead of the compiler taking up the slack (as in RISC), a combination of the compiler, the programmer, some very smart scheduling software
Requiring programmers to learn how to write parallel code that makes good use of this processor seems pretty dicey to me. Few programmers have been trained to write parallel code (most struggle with threading). The fact that no popular programming language has a good parallel model is also a big stumbling block.
This problem seems to be looming for all the dual core processors, but I havent seen a big effort to teach programmers how to adapt.
Slashdotting a "free-speech" supporting server because you don't like what they have to say.
I'm falling out of my chair here!
The iBook 600 MHz is a budget-class laptop. Comparing it to the top of the line Pentium desktop of the time is inappropriate.
A budget-class PC laptop of that time might have been about 900 MHz to 1.1 GHz. I wouldn't consider such a laptop anything near useable. They tended to have poor quality sound systems that bottlenecked the processor and atrociously short battery times. The ibook was legendary for its excellent battery performance.
Moreover, a 600 MHZ iBook in use today is significantly faster than the day it was sold, because OS X has continued to get faster. I think you'll find a three year old PC laptop much slower than the day it was released with the continued layering of hardware driver applications, service packs, and firewalls/virus scanners. That's a *well-maintained* machine. A poorly maintained three year old PC laptop would be little more than a spambot doorstop. A poorly maintained iBook is just likely to have too many icons on the desktop.
If you read books, or at least watch the history channel... then you would know Hannibal was the man that brought elephants over the Alps and routed and slaughtered Romans by the ten of thousands using but swords and spears. The only thing people dis him about was his one mistake to not go ahead and take Rome -- instead of giving them the chance to surrender. Hell, if lack of perfection is your only flaw that's a hell of a compliment.
He also was a great politician after the Tunic wars.
Stanford professor Dally's stream processor.
It's almost just like Cell but has onchip memory to solve the bandwidth problem.
Dally worked for Cray and mentioned that todays supercomputers are not efficient.
New consoles are sold at a loss, but there's a limit to how muc of a loss companies can take. If the CPU itself ends up costing Sony $300+, they'd be looking at a massive loss on the consoles, probably larger than they are willing to take. That was actually a noted problem with the X-box, the loss per unit was large so they had to sell quite a few games per unit to make it up. I'm not even sure if they made any money on it.
Well, in MS's case, they can pull shit like that. Microsoft makes loads of cash off their software division, and has loads already in the bank. They can afford to operate a new division at a loss, even a pretty substanital loss (if the X-box division did lose money, it wasn't a large amount).
Sony, not to much. Their Playstation divison is their biggest money maker these days. So they can afford to take a loss on console hardware, but only so much that they know they'll make it back on games. They can't risk operating the division at a loss because it'd spell serious trouble for the company. They also aren't flush with cash. They've about $10 Billion, but have $12 Billion or so in debt (Microsoft has $34 Billion and no debt to speak of). They have to keep the money rolling in or things get ugly.
Also we know from history that having the fastest processor or shinest graphics isn't what wins a given round of the console wars. It's all about games, and perception.
Now who knows on pricing at this point, but the grandparent has a good point. That is a massive god damn die, like P4EE sized or so. Hot and expensive. As die size goes up, so do failure rates and thus cost, espically at high clock speeds. Hence why the EEs cost so damn much. I'd say it's a safe bet that this cell processor isn't going to be cheap.
From the sounds of it, it's not going to need to be. Sounds like it's a high end calculation chip for badass number crunchers. Given that Power4/5s and Itanium 2s are popular for that sort of thing, people in those apps won't bat an eye at a $1000+ price tag.
So how is this architecture so revolutionary and amazing when compared to the processor in the Cray X1? (Which has a MIPS [like PPC, but without broken IO] core, and multiple vector units configured in much the same way as this seems to be).
I do not represent myself.
you can keep the malware off.
But I can run Appleworks and Apple's mail on my 300 MHz, 192 MByte iBook while it serves apache to the web and compiles things like tomcat.
And I don't have to fight with stupid VB macros! (Do have to fight with stupid Applescript scripts.)
I haven't attempted to tune it to handle a slashdotting, so I won't offer a pointer.
will be using this "SoC".
However, after having RTFA(s), the Cell processor
would look like a very good candidate for a F/OSS
VIDEO BOARD - fast multicore processors, a large
local memory, simplified RISC with most control
in software, and a 64-bit PPC "traffic cop".
One additional area (at least) that I would
expect the Cell processor to be incorporated
into would be next generation radar and sonar
systems, due to vector processing capabilities.
I would love to see an IBM development system
for this architecture, but wouldn't expect to
buy a PS3 and Sony "game" SDK, due to closed
source and NDA incompatabilities with GPL.
I want an OS I can use.
It is heterogenous CMP with distributed memory ... much more traditional than a stream processor, whether that is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion.
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-95c522b451-5fecbd4 4ca-8132b87ed4
Check my journal for even mor
Here's a sample opcode for a floating-point multiply-add
OP | RT | RB | RA | RC
Good read? Yeah sure.
Not quite. The Cell is 9 complete yet simple CPU's in one. Each handles its own tasks with its own memory. Imagine 9 computers each with a really fast network connection to the other 8. You could problably treat them as extra vector processors, but you'd then miss out on a lot of potential applications. For instance, the small processors can talk to each other rather than work with the PowerPC at all.
Hardly. Sony is following the same game plan as they did with their Emotion Engine in the PS2. Everyone thought that they were losing 1-200 bucks per machine at launch, but financial records have shown that besides the initial R&D (the cost of which is hard to figure out), they were only selling the PS2 at a small loss initially, and were breaking even by the end of the first year. By fabbing their own units, they took a huge risk, but they reaped huge benefits. Their risk and reward is roughly the same now as it was then.
Doubtful. The problem is that though the main CPU is PowerPC-based like current Apple chips, it is stripped down, and the Altivec support will be much lower than in current G5s. Unoptomized, Apple code would run like a G4 on this hardware. They would have to commit to a lot of R&D for their OS to use the additional 8 processors on the chip, and redesign all their tweaked Altivec code. It would not be a simple port. A couple of years to complete, at least.
This is half-true. While it will be hard, most game logic will be performed on the traditional PowerPC part of the Cell, and thus normal to program. The difficult part will be concentrated in specific algorithms, like a physics engine, or certain AI. The modular nature of this code will mean that you could buy a physics engine already designed to fit into the 128k limitation of the subprocessor, and add the hooks into your code. Easy as pie.
Bwahahaha! No way. This is a delicate bit of coding that is going to need to be tweaked by highly-paid coders for every single game. Letting on OS predictively determine what code needs to get sent to what processor to run is insane in this case. The cost of switching out instructions is going to be very high, so any switch will need to be carefully considered by the designer, or the frame-rate will hit rock-bottom.
This is one myth that could be correct. The Cell is huge (relatively), and given IBM's problems in the recent past with making large, fast PowerPC chips, it's a huge gamble on the part of all parties involved that they can fab enough of these things.
The SPARC V8 spec is open, there's also an open source implementation: the Leon and it's supported by Linux.
The chip sounds rather typical of Sony and so is the hype. I don't think workstations will be based off anything like what is described in the article. Marketing statements like that are similar to the old fanboy propaganda about the PS2 being clustered by Saddam(with what software and what interconnects?). If it is running Linux/BSD as a workstation, wouldn't there be discussions on the mailing lists. Even if IBM ever planned to do that they would be talking to outside developers. This chip will need a well optimized compiler to work halfway normal. Programmer/compiler controlled L1 sounds like something needing flushed per context switch in a multiuser OS. I think it just makes it more critical that Sony makes a good development kit. From what I heard, the PS2 lacked that. It also sounds like it can do many number crunches per cycle, now how the DSPs and core actually orchestrate that will be important. If it does come out at 4GHz and with a solid ISA, it could be used as a multipurpose CPU, but it doesn't appear to be geared that way. It looks like it may lead to other uses than the PS3, but it is definitely built for Sony's needs first. I really fear they are not addressing ease of development like they should. I also don't think that the chip will reach economies of scale to make it cheap to produce for its size(compared to of the shelf processors). If it is a fast processor with little internal communication overheads, a good compilter, then great. Otherwise it may be just more Sony proprietary junk.
What VCR?
Last VCR we owned died while I was out of the country. Probably has something to do with the significant other unplugging everything when we leave the house, so, yes, I gave up resetting the clock well before we started dating.
But even then before it died, it didn't "blick" 12:00 when we were watching because all that was on-screen. No LED/LCD panel. We never saw the "blicking" 12:00 unless we deliberately selected the setup screen.
Now, the microwave does "blick" 12:00 while it's in use, except when we put something in to cook while we're out. (When I say she unplugs everything, I mean everything. Except the fridge. And the iBook which is hosting my personal web page.)
So, what's your point?
The cell processor is a juggernaught of potential, but not at all to be considered the end-all be-all for the CPU circus. This whole entire mess is so far, 100% hype. It's easy to loose sight of reality with a gaggle of multi-billion dollar hype machines on the prowl, so don't feel too bad about it.
Recently, to guage how effective the first wave of hype was going, I ran a little experiment here on slashdot. You can see it here. In this experiment, I ran through the basics of the Cell project, only substituting x86 tech and using casual language. The replies and rating that came of it are very telling. Only one person mentioned the Cell, and nobody bothered to add up and scale the mips/flops. Needless to say, there was a wide range of severe and dismissive commentary besides (this being slashdot). The point is, stripped of the marketing talk, this technology really isn't very exciting. And considering the radical departure in logic layout, I'd say there's a fair chance that this is going to suck, big time.
The thing to do here is break the issue up into the bits that matter:
There's the technology aspect, which bodes somewhat well, but after you subtract some overhead for marketing fluff ups, implementation woes and the likelyhood of launch problems, you can see that this chip is going to fare poorly against the offerings of intel and amd two or three chipsets down the road, which is when we can expect to see this chip on the street.
Then there's the business aspect. You can see some mighty movements by the behemoths involved, but not all of the movements are graceful or even sensible. Namely, Sony spearheading the effort to expand on their emotion engine technology. This by itself is a little perverse, as quite frankly, the playstation 2 was a mess when it shipped. Dev units were late and scarce. Tools were non-existant and the actual chipset was so difficult that many of the first wave of games lacked some of the most basic filtering (anti-aliasing, anyone?). Kludges and workarounds eventually surfaced, though even now games are coming out that can't even match the dreamcast for basic visual quality.
The real reason for the success of the ps2 was the licensing options for developers. that is to say, logo requirements were almost devoid of restrictions, limited only to obvious flaws. So the platform ended up with a huge library of mediocre games, and that's percieved as value by the buying public and developers alike. Compare to Nintendo's prohibitions against excessive graphic content (relaxed, sure, as the platform market played out, but still a factor for developers when setting out to choose a console to focus on), or Microsoft's standard stranglehold on premium marketing opportunities and secrets of the APIs.
Then there's the joining forces of all these big companies. Remember that Sony and Sony America often butt heads to their own detriment. Mix in Toshiba and IBM and it reads like a recipe for disaster from my vantage point. They will fragment as the chip nears rollout or soon into the lifecycle, as soon as their contrary expectations start to clarify. Deals will be broken, production, design and inventory will be manipulated... in general, there's going to be friction no matter how they proceed. The degree to which we'll have to wait and see, but the first romantic flush of this particular orgy will look quit different the morning after the debauchery. Mainly, this will come as the disparate parties attempt to react in their own ways to the movement of their competitors.
Toshiba also has ample motivation to screw Sony...
Anyway, to wrap up my rambling, suffice it to say that, just as with the Crusoe, when the Cell hits the street it's going to be just another platform. Many of the purported applications will likely never materialize, and the certainly overblown nature of the hype has already turned me off completely.
be parallellizeable to some extent?
Granted, gcc would need som reprogramming to work this, but I think with a decent compiler-rewrite any standard c-code should be able to run on chips like this with at least some parallellization-benefits.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
As much as the idea of massive parallelism appeals to me (closer to reality), the more I read about Cell, the more I wonder if this is the right direction to be heading in. Sony is pushing the low level housekeeping back up the stack into software, while Microsoft is making things as easy as possible for coders by letting them write solely to high level APIs like DirectX.
Cell will no doubt be super fast when driven correctly, but that could prove to be a significant additional cost to the development budget.
But what would I know..
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Fast and easy for:
:(
Highly prallelizable single precision floating point calculations.
Slow and difficult for:
Complex integer logic.
Double precision floating point math.
From the looks of it, Cell will be a decent gaming engine. Expect highly impressive (not necessarily realistic) gaming physics. AI developers, though, may not be able to squeeze enough performance from Cell for leap ahead AI complexity unless they figure out a way to do AI with floating point matrices. We may therefore start seeing neural networks becoming more popular for PS3 AI's.
The question is, other than gaming development, what will IBM's Cell workstations and servers be good for? Possibly movie CG, military training simulations, imagery processing, etc.
Those hoping for ideal scientific computing platforms will have to look elsewhere unless IBM comes out with double precision SPUs.
Several companies provide MIPs and ARM based SOC.
So basically this processor is an attempt to address what this guy calls 'Memory to Execution' latency, for a very specific set of applications - ones with lots of 4-D vector transforms. General purpose code execution is probably going to suck, but it could shine in video games and perhaps some types of robotic and embedded applications, but that will depend upon power-usage and heat. Maybe the programmers will have Super Mario 12 ready for it by 2013.
GCC should be able to compile binaries for the cell cpu in 1 year of the cell's release, meaning someone should be able to compile netbsd and/or linux for it, both the kernel and userland. I would imagine it would not be optimised much first, but threading will suddenly be important on both platforms, and we can expect much more attention on libpthreads, as well as the SMP scheduler of the linux kernel. It should be able to recognise different-strength CPUs and assign tasks, even reserve a cpu for graphics functions, reserve another for running certain drivers etc. (I dont know if its currently capable of all that).
So in a few years time its possible the development of at least one of the unixen, will be focused on highly threaded distributed applications, new scheduler and libc designs to help in that, and better levels of performance than a linear monolithic kernel with none or bad threading and the simple scheduler that linux had a while ago.
Would it kill Palm to release opensource BeOS at a time like this, when a BeOS compiled for the cell CPU will be the killer desktop OS?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Reading the article, it reminds me of the typical mainframe architecture, where you have a central supervisory CPU, but most of the specialized work is done by the channel processors.
In the Cell, the main PPC CPU appears to identify a piece of work that needs to be done, schedules it to run on a SPE, uploads the code snippet to the SPE's LS via DMA transfer, and then goes off and does something else worthwhile while the SPE munches on it. I presume there's an interrupt mechanism to let the PPC know that a SPE has some results to return.
Compiler writers ought to be able to handle this new architecture well enough -- it's sort of like the current CPU/GPU split, where you've got the main program running on the system CPU, and specialized graphical transform programlets running on the GPU. There may need to be macros or code section identifiers in the source to let the compiler know which to target for that bit of code.
Obviously, this is just the first iteration of the Cell processor. I can see them widening the SPE from single precision to double precision (for the scientific market -- the game market probably doesn't need it), and going to a multi-core design to reduce the die size.
Chip H.
Slashpanda denies that he's been posting to this thread, but I don't believe him.
Actually the latest graphics processors from ATI and NVidia have about 200 Million transistors already and an Athlon has about 50 Million.
So a cell is probably going to be faster, smaller, cheaper and runnig cooler than the usual CPU+GPU system we have in most highend PCs today.
You're forgetting that a machine with the Cell processor still needs seperate GPU. The PS3 will use the Cell, but it is also using an Nvidia GPU.
So you can't compare the Athlon + GPU to a Cell, you need to compare the Athlon + GPU to a Cell + GPU.
It seems to me that this is a natural for Apple - it will give them a 5x - 10x performance boost over anything that's on the drawing boards over at Intel.
Don't believe the hype. Sony is using the same pattern of press releases and hype that they used regarding the Emotion Engine before the PS2 came out. They claimed it would be more than twice as fast as the highest end Intel chips.
When it actually came out, the performance it delivered wasn't even up to par with the mid range Celeron/P3 that the Xbox used. I'm sure in a few hand-selected calculations it excelled, and gave them the legal ability to claim it was more than twice as fast as the highest end PC chips. But real world performance paled in comparison to the claims.
Sometimes I wonder how many times you can fool a dog with the same trick. Most dogs learn after a couple times, but some never seem to figure it out.
In this case, we have Sony releasing all sorts of big claims and hype just like they did with the Emotion Engine. Anybody remember that? It's a tried and true tactic meant to generate interest in a product. It leads people to believe that something very exciting is about to occur, a revolution is just around the corner... this time maybe their wildest dreams will come true.
But as usually is the case, and the case with the Emotion Engine, it turns out to be "just another chip". Regardless of all the claims and details on paper, the actual silicon has limitations. Rarely does something revolutionary occur; usually it's more of a modest evolutionary improvement.
But modest improvements don't generate the hype that "amazing, revolutionary" product announcements do, so the PR departments do what works and they try to fool the unsuspecting public.
And here we are, falling for the same tricks.
Molecular dynamics (protein folding, etc) is one field which is primarily single precision, and there are others as well. The errors in the model are far larger than roundoff error even at 32 bits, so wasting time/transistors/watts on more bits is pointless. See _Numerical_Recipes_in_C_ for a nice rant on single vs. double precision.
Your post: "OK, if you want to include emulation then technically it might be doable with a 68k port of PearPC. But it's not going to happen natively."
Do you see any mention of native code running in the original post? Are you not a native speaker, and you confused the word "nicely" with the word "natively"?
And wtf is a "68k port of PearPC"? Do you even know what PearPC is? From sourceforge:
Maybe you should ask someone that is knowledgeable about computers what "architecture-independent" means.
Maybe I'm being too rough on you, but what sort of an ass tries to get in the last word and counter a funny example from danamania with a stupid qualification like "But it's not going to happen natively." Of course it's not going to happen natively! Did you go to school in Kansas or something?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Because you didn't read the article?
The only cores they currently stack are memory chips; this is because memory logic runs comparatively cool. Stacked Cell processors would melt.
Spoke claimed in the name of child porno!
I know when people mention the Xbox-2 a group always mention backwards compatability like a crazed console fan boy and then the rest of us tell them why it would be very hard due to architectural differences. We take it as a given that the ps3 will be backwards compatable and it seems the design fo the cell seems to have backwards compatability in mind. It's veyr loosly structured to be similiar (to my primitive knowlege of the chip layouts in the ps2) to the EE chip.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."