Prospects For the CELL Microprocessor Beyond Games

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."

Comments

I'll believe it when I see it

[chris09876]

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.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it

[BobPaul]

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.

Reminds me of Chuck Moore's 25x multicomputer chip

[LourensV]

Some time ago Chuck Moore proposed the 25x , a single chip holding a 5x5 array of simple processors. That's what this reminded me of when I first read about it. As Mr. Moore said in that Slashdot interview, "[...] the 25x is a solution looking for a problem." Cell theoretically has a lot of performance, and we're talking FLOPS not MIPS. It will certainly be useful or even revolutionary in televisions and game computers, as well as for scientific calculations. I don't see it making your desktop or server much faster though. Those don't need more FLOPS, they need more I/O bandwidth and faster peripherals, and perhaps more MIPS. I can see Cell workstations, but in the same way as you have SPARC workstations and laptops now: as development tools for the "real" hardware.

What software will it run

[akc]

I've been reading about the Cell processor for a few weeks now, and there is never any discussion about the operating system architecture necessary to get this thing to perform.

As I see it, its a Power PC of OK quality with 8 subsidiary processors optimised for operating a relatively simple task on a relatively small amount of memory.

So - port Linux to it? But how?. Relatively easily, to make use of the main processor, but what sort of subsystem do you build so that the subsidiary processors get used to their full potential. Perhaps part of X could be configured to run on these processors - but that would be a very manual tweak to make use of the architecture. And with the best will in the world, these processors would then sit around unused for most of the time.

What you need is a more general concept, probably at the programming language level, in which algorithmns can be expressed in such a way that the operating system can detect that they can be loaded into these subsidiary processors to be executed.

But there doesn't seem to be anything about that in the news out there. Presumably Sony are going to do something for the PS/3 - what? and is it going to be general purpose, since much of the benefit from their purposes will be a super motion graphics processor for games.

Until we understand what the software infrastructure to make use of the architecture of this new chip will be, then I can't see how we can make predictions of its success in the more general processor market. Before then its just marketing hype.

To the putz who submitted this news post:

[Hannibal_Ars]

If you're going to rip the links out of one of my Ars news posts and submit them to slashdot (in the same order in which I linked them, no less), then at least credit your source.