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Toshiba Demonstrates Cell Microprocessor
Cybro writes "Toshiba has demonstrated some cool applications for the Cell Microprocessor. They also revealed that they have written their own OS for the new processor. However the article on TechOn does not reveal the license of the OS."
does this have any application besides video?
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars . ars m l
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.ht
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Toshiba Demonstrates Cell Microprocessor Simultaneously Decoding 48 MPEG-2 Streams
Apr 25, 2005 14:15
Toshiba demonstrated that its Cell microprocessor, jointly developed with the Sony Group and IBM Corp., can simultaneously decode 48 SDTV format MPEG-2 streams. At the COOL Chips VIII event held in Yokohama from April 20 to 22, 2005, the company showed a film demonstrating the decoding process.
In the film, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected onto a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video in each cell. The company expects the technology to be used to display thumbnails for a video list. Of the eight synergistic processor elements (SPE) used in the Cell, six are used for decoding 48 MPEG-2 streams and one is used for scaling the screen. The remaining SPE can be used for a completely different processing function.
In the demonstration, Toshiba used an operating system environment it had developed to increase the efficiency of Cell software development. One of the environment's key features is that application software developers can program software without considering which threads will be allotted to each of the different SPEs, because the environment allows the automatically scheduling software to SPEs.
It doesn't say anywhere what the bitrates of the originating SD streams were. That is a biggie in terms of processing power. MPEG2 can run from 1.5Mbps (crap) to 50 Mbps (I Frame only, dam good) and higher. Give me more info and I might be impressed.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I swear the screenshot looks like it is WMP... I can't believe that windows is going to work on the CELL. Anybody have any info on what OS will be supported (other than the Toshiba OS?)
totally baffled how one could write something for the cell that we would traditionally call an "OS". At least, a time sharing OS. Who gets to use the SPE/APU/SPUs, and when? The attatched memory on the SPEs is nontrivial to swap to memory, and it seems absurd to think that it would just be done offhand with a context switch. Yet, context switches must happen. So are SPEs merely given to processes, who get to keep them, so that the main processor is switching betwen processes normally in a preemptive style but the SPEs stay under the control of single processes?
Or is the Cell OS Toshiba's using here non-multitasking or cooperative multitasking? Or what?
Well, in this picture I see a movie file being played (on what seems to be WMP) showing the cells on the screen.
Now, I wasn't there, nor was the article really in depth by any means, but it would seem to me that this was nothing more than a movie demonstration and nothing live.
I'm not quite so impressed. Maybe we should start linking to real content from the front page (i.e. in-depth accounts and not some blogger's one page summary with a blurry photo of a movie file being played on a projection screen).
Ken Kutaragi Talks about Cell
0 407/103542/
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/2005
Isn't even *exactly* how impressive a multitasking feat it was, but that if I'm reading the article right, the 48-stream decoding thing was done *entirely by the auxillary processor units*. That is, the "SPE"s. The main [PPE] processor in the Cell was apparently not really doing anything at the time. This seems to bode wel for the usability of the SPEs.
this............
http://www.lod.org/Projects/Other//index.htm
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It's a video of the demo running in WMP.
^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Not cool actually. It was more than likely just a video demonstration of what Cell can do running in WMP. So...this could be nothing to write home about at all..
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Here is a business idea for some small to mid size hardware company.
The CELL processor is cool and the geeks love it and it is based on the POWER architecture. Surely, it'll run Linux.
Build a machine with the CELL. Don't follow any standards (well, use PCI and PCI express Serial ATA and USB 2.0 and stuff like that). But just make sure that you are first out the door with a box.
And make it cheap. It must be possible to make it cheap since it will be sold in the PS3.
I bet that there'll be a lot of enthusiasts that will buy it and be early adopters which will help you work out the bugs.
And then, a year after your first release you'll have a computer that is very fast for its price and a system which is source code compatible with the largest source code library in the world.
Well, I know I'd consider buying one.
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That's really quite impressive. I wish I could see it in motion, though ;_;
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
I got the perfect OS for the Cell Processor. I just need funding. :-D
The COSA Operatin System
See also the link below.
"... the company showed a film demonstrating the decoding process.
..."
In the film, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected onto a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video in each cell. The company expects the technology
If you bothered to read the article contents, you'll see that they simply showed a video of the process actually working.
This is a far cry from a live tech demo, but if they can really pull it off, definitely shows the power of a Cell.
Wouldn't it be nice to combine this article and the previous one and have a Cell to make your 720p TV display 1080i content properly? :)
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Some clever Linux programmers will have ported their favorite distro over to the Cell processor within a few minutes of its release.
It's a video running in WMP of the videos running on Cell. Cell doesn't run WinXP.
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...if you look hard enough, you can see the Windows logo in the top left-hand corner
The article didn't say that Cell was doing the decoding live. Most likely, they recorded Cell/their OS doing the decoding straight to a TV screen, and were replaying the video of that on Windows Media Player.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Now *THIS* is the interesting part on their OS. Because the SPEs have different kinds. When I looked at the cell architecture, I thought: "Programming for this thing is going to be a MAJOR MESS!"
Thumbs up for Toshiba on figuring this out AND doing something about it.
Anyone else notice that the OS that Toshiba wrote is playing Windows Media Player 9 Series, unless there is a WMP9 skin for mplayer or similar and Toshiba's OS is a *nix derivative.
Free MacMini
For all those talking about what kind of OS Cell will run:
ZDNet Article on Cell
The article is dated in some ways (like when it says 16 cores...I believe it is half that right?) but it does point out some interesting things, for example, like the fact that there will be a Cell SDK and a end-user OS aimed at embedded devices and the like.
If you google around for 'cell forums' you will come across interesting discussions where they point out that linux will be ported very quickly to cell and that IBM has hinted at possible uses for Cell as a workstation. Also, Cell is OS NEUTRAL meaning that it does not have any particular hardware functionality that makes one OS run any faster.
Overall, I would say that since market penetration is needed, you can't just say "Here is our OS and our SDK, use it from now on". The trick will be of course, to assuage the existing target audience who use today's OS's.
Also, note that the Cell is not a processor bred entirely for the PS3 or anything like that - it will be embedded in devices such as PVR's, TV's, music players, and in all likelyhood, it will even find its way to the desktop - with its potential it is likely to also find some niche in supercomputing since it will be cheap (if 4 whole cells can be thrown into a game console why not?)
There is talk among the Mac community that the Cell processor might be what is needed to get fast HD video decoding capability into their systems... If you check the current system recommendations for decoding HD in Quicktime, it requires a pretty fast system already. Perhaps Cell would fix that.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
[ disclaimer: this is speculation but it's informed speculation - hopefully useful ]
;-)
It's worth bearing in mind this is unlikely to be an OS in the common sense. I'd rate it very unlikely that this OS supports such niceties as filesystems, network IO stacks, protected processes, etc - or that it ever will.
Rather, it's likely to be a shim (albeit a clever one) for insulating the developers of embedded-style applications from the real hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if this Toshiba OS is actually a "library operating system" which is linked into the application itself.
Don't think of it as an OS in the Linux sense, more as a toolkit / library for Cell programmers. Exactly how a "conventional" OS will run on the Cell is not clear to me but it seems certain that it can support a Linux-style OS well - otherwise it'd scupper Cell's World Domination plans
. . . as long as Toshiba's OS can be deleted and Linux can be installed on the hardware.
Seriously, Cell Processors provide a great platform for Linux to compete head-to-head with Microsoft, and to introduce people to the world of the GPL and open-source software.
Microsoft is inevitably going to release a version of Windows for the Cell Processors--they'd be stupid not to do so. However, Microsoft has its main marketing focus on Longhorn right now. The public has no idea what these Cell Processors are, and they aren't anticipating a release from Microsoft to show them how to use this new technology.
Linux has the advantage in that it can switch directions at any time. What it needs to do is focus on Cell Processors--get ported over to this platform, get some hardware manufacturer to pick up the OS (IBM?) for use in new computers, and get out there in public. If Linux can be one of the first to market, people can finally be introduced to the GPL and open-source software on a massive scale.
Cell Processors provide the perfect opportunity to break the Microsoft mindset. Right now people are prevented from switching over to Linux because it's more complicated using the same hardware. "Why should I *delete* my copy of Windows to install Debian, which doesn't have all of my favorite apps or games?" the user asks.
However, people can be told Cell Processors are different. It's likely that a Windows port to this processor would function differently from an x86 system, so people will have to adapt to new ways of computing anyway. But, this fact doesn't matter so much--as long as Linux gets there first and does cool stuff reasonably well, people will switch. If it's not too complicated, they can easily adapt and will readily do so to use this cool technology.
Though it's the Cell Processor that's the workhorse, most people associate the advanced hardware with the software that overlays it. Thus, to 90% of America, a brand-new fast computer equals Windows. If Linux can beat Microsoft and show off the new technology, then suddenly this "Linux" is the best and fastest OS out there. Who wouldn't want to use more of this GPLed and open-source software?
I hope the Linux community can take advantage of this great opportunity.
> However the article on TechOn does not reveal the license of the OS.
...
It uses the FCL.
The Fight Club License.
First Rule of the FCL:
Even if you're considering that you're talking about the crap feed, that's 48 times 1.5Mbps or an aggregate of 72Mbps. Pretty damn impressive considering the floating point contortions you're having to go through to get there- a PC wouldn't be likely to handle that many 1.5Mbits streams let alone higher rates. And this is going to be at the heart of the PS3.
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could be a video shot of the video demonstration ... and the video shot is played on WMP.
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Typical Japanese ..
But I honestly would like to see this platform win over intel/amd dual core procs..
Cool Chips website with the program
c hips1/ c hips1/001.html
http://www.coolchips.org/
Another report for the conference (in Japanese, with pics)
http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2005/04/28/cool
http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/articles/2005/04/28/cool
And what I said (in my post talking about WMP) was that the blog linked to from the main page was light on details, showed nothing more than a blurry screenshot of the demo movie, and wasn't worth reporting on.
Sorry, but so many people have been able to dupe the public with demos (nevermind movies of demos) that we shouldn't even bother to put this stuff on the main page.
Anyone remember the tiny helicopter robot or the guy that claimed blazing speeds over analog modems?
In my other highly moderated account I get mod points regularly. I have set about systematically modding down Garcia with them to strike a blow for good taste and good sense at Slashdot. But the fight is long and arduous! I need other strong, willing souls to fight the good fight! Join me in modding Garcia to the level of a pathetic troll! Whenever you get mod points, go through each of Garcia's posts in his history and mod them 'Overrated'. That way they will not be meta-modderated and you can continue your work indefinitely. Try and mod the older, less active stories where he is less likely to be modded back up. Join with me in my glorious quest! Join me in the first mod lynching on Slashdot of this serial irritant. Yours, SneakyTroll.
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If this is true, this ends the discussion about the viability of the PS3 platform. One of the main concerns was that development on the CELL would be really hard - two complicated as a result of many SPE's but as you can see they claim this wcan be done automatically. It's a proof of concept the platform needed. The same development architecture can be altered for gaming for sure. Just leave any other crunch to the power PC arch.... The PS3 is now in overdrive..!!
But the fight is long and arduous! I need other strong, willing souls to fight the good fight! Join me in modding Garcia to the level of a pathetic troll! Whenever you get mod points, go through each of Garcia's posts in his history and mod them 'Overrated'. That way they will not be meta-modderated and you can continue your work indefinitely. Try and mod the older, less active stories where he is less likely to be modded back up. Join with me in my glorious quest! Join me in the first mod lynching on Slashdot of this serial irritant.
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1. In Soviet Russia, Cell processor imagines Beowulf cluster of you!
2. ???
3. Profit!
this image can explain a lot for you?8 /coolchips1/images/016l.jpg
http://pcweb.mycom.co.jp/photo/articles/2005/04/2
Obviously there is some power here. What I'm curious about is :
1. Will Video Games be able to take advantage of this (PS3)
2. I know multithreading opens a huge bag of worms in programming (Race Conditions, concurrency, deadlock, etc.). So, How hard will it be to develop i.e. will the SDK's be any good.
This could be the most powerful system on earth, but if the game devlopers cant code against it, then whats the point?
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10.
Far from factious. Cell would be enormously good at video processing kinds of applications, and if it's cheap enough could cetainly compete with the ASIC, DSP, and (increasingly) FPGA systems that are used in the field today.
I'm sure a set top box vendor loves the idea of a chip that can decode compressed video, process it, and run a Java applet in the same piece of silicon.
My video compression blog
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Has there been any info leaked about the PS3 SDK? Programming a game on a massively parallel platform like the CELL can't be easy, especially for a console industry used to a fairly traditional hardware environment.
In many respects, the Saturn failed because the SDK was just too hard to work with, as did the N64 (although that also had the cartridge limitation to further pull it down).
Given that it seems like the PS3 will surely trounce the Xbox360 in HW capabilities, I wonder whether ease of development will have the final say on who has the better gaming platform.
wasnt BeOS's original demo 50 copies of the star wars trailer playing simultaniously
by releasing a new picture of the Xbox 360. Bill Gates was heard to remark, 'Quick, buy out Toshiba before they ruin everything!'
You'd NEVER make heads or tails of it.
I found it an interesting interview on several fronts, but it was slightly curious to me that he didn't mention the Inmos Transputer in his short review of the evolution of computing.
:-)
Of course, in such a brief summary you can't expect much detail, but the point about the Transputer was that it's the only relevant precursor to the Cell that has made it to market in a substantial way (there was a whole Transputer industry very active for most of a decade). Arbitrary-sized networks of small communicating hardware elements like Kutaragi envisages are nothing new to Transputer fans, and I'm sure that he knows it.
My guess is that he would prefer to leave the Transputer forgotten, because it introduced a paradigm that was way ahead of its time and it didn't catch on. (The fact that it was invented by Inmos in the UK instead of Intel in the US didn't help of course.)
The PR side of Kutaragi probably doesn't want to taint the Cell with any mention of past "revolutions" that fizzled out despite their supreme technical merits. I wish him great success though --- I'll certainly be buying a Cell-based PS3 the instant it comes out.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I read the whole blachford.info article, and it's worthless. It reads like a conspiracy nut's page first of all, and the information is inaccurate second of all. None of that is surprising if you look around on his website, you'll see that he is in fact a loon.
I would have been impressed if there 48 1080i displays all connected to the cell processor.
That would be impressive.
You don't need a license to use your own software. A license comes into play when you distribute your software.
Dedicating individual processors to applications (there are, what, a dozen or so SPEs at least?), and then the main PPC CPU can act as a normal task-switching general-purpose CPU when the tasks get too numerous, or for doing low-utilization or one-time tasks.
I'm sure you could architect more sophisticated schemes that allows the OS to more transparently allocate processes to SPEs.
I would probably use the PowerPC chip for low-impact background threads and general application use that doesn't push the processor, and when a particular process starts demanding serious computational power, dedicate it to some SPEs.
For example, you're surfing on a browser, which doesn't consume much power. You realize you need to compress a big-honking file to send your friend. So you crank up WinRAR and compress some stuff.
The PPC chip can handle the browser and the OS tasks. But when WinRAR gets cranking, it wants as much CPU as it gets. So the WinRAR SPE
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
oh, you mean Arm...
"You don't need a license to use your own software. A license comes into play when you distribute your software."
The fact that the question was even asked is the insightful part. GPL-think runs deeper than people think. Even when it doesn't apply.
All this stuff is nice, but until i can actually get one and mess with it on my bench its still just 'ooh, thats cool'.
Lets see some silicon!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What might be interesting would be generic cell PCI card. Say 8 or more Cell processors which could be used in your PC/Mac for generic applications such as 3D processing, video encoding/decoding, encryption etc.
Mod it up for those who didn't RTFA.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Because either way, you are going to have to define new process structures to represent each auxiliary processor units as well as the PowerPC CPU and recompile the kernel. For such real-time processing you want to keep the data structures to the absolute minimum and not have any 'fluff' left over from previous CPU architectures. Writing a kernel from scratch is the best way to achieve this.
Much like theTAOS OS did.
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Synergistic Processor Elements? They aren't seriously going to start calling it that... please lord no.
I refuse to use some old buzzword from the 90s' megacorporations to describe my computer hardware. Forget about it.
You're nothing; like me.
couple of socks full will be enough to implement a reasonable facsimile, in the black box sense, of a human brain.
Turing's test requires a telepathy proof room. This is something yet to be developed.
When will toshiba go into full scale production with this thing?
Would be nice to get a hold of one of these to test with things like large matrix inversion and just massively parallelizable computational stuff in general.
I'm sure cell would whoop the living crap out of "netburst" for video encoding and 3d rendering farms.
Simultaneous MPEG2 decoding, as shown here, is what computer architects call an embarrassingly-parallel problem. The easiest way to speed it up is just add more processors - with 8 processing units, the Cell is a great fit.
However, the really interesting problems are the ones that don't scale linearly in performance with the number of processors - these are the tasks for which the Cell processor will probably be running with 7 idle units and 1 active. These are also the tasks where we need actually new architectures; supercomputers like BlueGene will tear their way through extremely parallel problems.
One very cool approach to handling less parallel workloads (or even "sequential" workloads - like the majority of programs people usually run on PCs) is speculative threading - taking a sequential program, breaking it up into chunks, and running those chunks in parallel. Of course, when you do this, you have to make sure that the later work doesn't depend on the earlier operations, and check for violations of "sequential execution semantics" (programs expecting sequential execution semantics are ones that expect their instructions to execute in order - basically any program you'd write today). The Stanford Hydra project is an example that uses this technique; Wisconsin Multiscalar Group takes an approach that requires modified binaries to do something similar.
One thing people fail to mention when they talk about the supposedly-amazing performance of the Cell processor is its floating point precision: first, it only attains it's >200GFLOPS with single precision numbers (not accurate enough for many scientific applications), and second, it doesn't follow IEEE754 rounding requirements. The rounding policy in IEEE754 floats is specifically designed so that as you perform more and more calculations, the error doesn't grow rapidly. Cutting corners lets you calculate faster but even less accurate numbers. Basically, to get the high FLOPS ratings, Cell sacrifices precision in both the number of bits used, and the accuracy of the data in those bits.
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Note that it seems IBM have been releasing some Cell support patches for Linux under the name "BPA" already...
You write: Transputer != microprocessor
m s_transputers.htm -- An intro to transputers
n /inmos/2186.pdf - 16-bit IMS T225 transputer (T200 famiily)
m s_t414.htm - 32-bit IMS T414 transputer (T400 family)
n /inmos/4260.pdf 32-bit IMS T9000 virtual-channel transputer
You really shouldn't comment on things you don't know anything about.
Here is some info on the transputer family, and links to data sheets on devices in each of the four main families. The T212, T414, and T805 became the most popular. And yes, they're all microprocessors, ie. a little integrated circuit CPU which you plug into a motherboard just like you do a Pentium, and with all the normal features of a normal microprocessor plus a few others of their own, like the 4 on-chip comms links. I've got a couple of T414's upstairs sitting on the shelf.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/i
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentatio
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/i
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/t805.htm - 32-bit IMS T805 f/p transputer (T800 family)
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentatio
These Inmos microprocessors were right down the middle of where Kutaragi wants to take the Cell, with lots of interdevice communications being handled directly by the hardware. Inmos even made graphics output chips which were often driven by multiple transputers in parallel, so graphics demos were really common on the transputer scene.
Interestingly, after being passed around between various European parties once Inmos ran out of money, the rights to the transputer were eventually sold off to some Japanese megacorp, iirc.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra