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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."
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
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).
You are right that it looks EXACTLY like WMP in full-screen mode. However, it seems unlikely that they ported it over to the weird OS they have going. Most likely they decode the streams and send raw data streams over a fast gigabit ethernet over to a comp with a media player that just chugs it through onto the screen. Or something like that anyways.
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.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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You don't need a license to use your own software. A license comes into play when you distribute your software.
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 ----
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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