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Prospects For the CELL Microprocessor Beyond Games

Posted by Zonk on from the tiny-but-brainy dept.

News for nerds writes "The ISSCC 2005, the "Chip Olympics", is over and David T. Wang at Real World Technologies put a very objective review of the CELL processor (the slides for the briefing are also available), covering all the aspects disclosed at the conference. Besides the much touted 256 GFlops single-precision floating point performance the CELL processor has 25-30 GFlops in double-precision, which is useful enough for scientific computation. Linus seems interested in CELL, too."

2 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. I'll believe it when I see it by chris09876 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a very positive review for the cell processor. It does seem like a really exciting new piece of technology. It promises a lot, and if it will do everything people say it will do, it really has the possibility to give the entire industry a big leap forward.

    That being said, I think it's important not to get too excited about it... it's hard to say if it will live up to everything that people have written about it. I'm a bit skeptical. Until I see some production units doing amazing things, I'm cautiously optimistic.

    --
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    1. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by BobPaul · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That being said, I think it's important not to get too excited about it... it's hard to say if it will live up to everything that people have written about it. I'm a bit skeptical. Until I see some production units doing amazing things, I'm cautiously optimistic

      I'm a little bit concerned about the PowerPC Element. The article states that it's not simply a Power5 derivative, but a core designed for high mhz at the cost of per stage logic depth. To quote the author: "The result is a processing core that operates at a high frequency with relatively low power consumption, and perhaps relatively poorer scalar performance compared to the beefy POWER5 processor core. "

      The means the PPE in the CELL @ 4Ghz will not perform as well as a Power5 would could it reach 4Ghz (but since the CELL has 8 SPEs, I would hope it performs better as a whole than a POWER5 at the same frequency). It would be interesting to know at what frequency the two are similar, but since the PPE is integrated into an extended system, this isn't something that can ever really be benchmarked.