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IBM Plans to Open the Cell Processor
morcheeba writes "According to an EETimes article, IBM is planning on releasing the full specifications and software libraries for the powerful processor that will be in the Playstation 3. The goal is to stimulate open-source development for other applications of the chip. The article doesn't mention if there will be some affordable development systems for all these programmers -- I'm hoping for a ps3 devkit." From the article: "IBM is eager to find other opportunities for Cell, but it's going to take a lot of software work...Going to the open-source community makes sense, because they could attract a lot of pretty smart programmers who could spin out software and applications for Cell."
I'll have it doing a lot more than just playing games in no time!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
I just realized this means both next-gen consoles and the GameCube all use IBM processors. Impressive. Now I hope they can hang on to the Mac market, and maybe both will benefit from advances in the other.
Probably do not care. The Cell is only part of the PS3 it is pretty unlikely that anyone else will build a console with it. It could actually help Sony in the long run.
The more people that buy Cells to put in to widgets the lower the cost for Sony.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
IBM wants open source dev on cells like MS wants developers coding for Windows. It's an sales tool to convince manufacturers to source their parts.
Given that the only cell device is the PS3, and that sony would sooner slit their wrists than let users write their own code for it, we can only assume that IBM is hoping somebody else will pick up the cell for consumer devices.
Unless mainstream systems start shipping, are we really going to see people using cell-based personal computers? If some affordable boards are developed then it would make sense to see alot of open source developed embedded solutions. After the demo of the cell processor some time ago decoding 17 video streams simultaneously, it should have some real potential for home/commercial media centers on embedded platforms.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
This could have a good plus side for many developers. One of the issues that I have been getting into lately is the open source appliance development. Previously I have been using xbox's and more recently the mac mini. One of the problems that I have had in developing software, tools and libaries is that I am often stuck with a lack of alternatives in hardware and performance. by having open plans for a high performance platform it will potentially give or open entirely new roads in development.
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Good thinking, IBM. Now, let's get SML/NJ, Haskell, and O'Caml ported to these things.
"Why", you may wonder, but the answer is simple: Referential transparency or any kind of confinement of side-effects makes for easy parallelisation, which is what these Cell thingies are supposed to rock at.
This might be the one thing that will put FP back into the undergraduate curriculum.
-- Christoph
Something this high-profile will help the business world see even more clearly the sheer, unadulterated power of Open Source.
I predict that the most innovative and enjoyable apps and games will come from developers who are working independently, on thier own, or in small groups, out of pure love of code. That is the way it has always been.
Technoli
Exactly what do the SPEs *do* in a timesharing OS such as Linux? Are the SPEs all parcelled out to processes on an individual basis, like normal processors would be? Are the SPEs attached to the same process as their corresponding normal-CPU PPC core, and the SPE's onboard memories just gets copied to main memory and then overwritten on every single context switch? Or what?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Nice to see someone as important as IBM realising the importnace of open HARDWARE. I've found that until recently the concept has been overlooked or even derided. Even open software advocates didn't "get it" and said it could never work, becasue hardware is different--the argumant was that hardware isn't something individuals or small companies could influence becasue of the high cost of entry, and big companies needed to make money off licensing closed IP to fund development and production of new hardware.
This day and age, such an argument is complete BUNK. Hardware design is done on computers and chip specifications are more often than not specified in VHDL or Verilog--the "source code" of hardware if you will. Not only is design and simulation within the reach of even hobbyists, the end result is very similar to software in characteristics. While IBM is not completely opening things up to the point of showing the "source code" of the Cell processor, it is a great step to see all the specifications etc. without encumbrances.
Quite frankly I'm surprised the open source movement hasn't advocated open hardware much more vigourously. After experiences around NVidia and ATI and Intel you'd have to be a fool not to realise that open hardware isn't just an interesing idea, it is NEEDED for the success of open software.
Linux Insider is running a couple of editorials speculating about running Linux on the 'Cell'. The bold prediction? 'the Linux developer community will, virtually en masse, abandon the x86 in favor of the new machine.'
Damned if they do, damned if they don't. And, you wonder why no one tailors to the F/OSS crowd... you people are never happy!
I really like this idea, personally. Full disclosure on hardware is always good. Regardless of running Linux, or not.
Linux? Sure. The "PPE" portion of the Cell is a POWER64, which Linux already runs on. The "SPE" engines are effectively going to need their own kind of OS to manage them, but you could start with a mostly-user-space API and move it into the Linux kernel after people have figured out what that OS should really look like. This is all new stuff.
Looking at the CELL architecture overview, though, the Cell doesn't look to me like a desktop replacement. It looks like a video card replacement. Think about it: the biggest piece of closed-source, proprietary hardware in your PC right now is your video card, with its sekrit interfaces and binary-only drivers. We're already starting to see a movement towards more general-purpose use of that hardware with things like nVidia's Cg toolkit. The CELL is the logical next step in that direction. You'll have a video card that runs Linux (or, ideally, a video card that acts as just another (heterogeneous) processor in your system).
Cell is a multipurpose system. It's main claim to fame is a low-level logic that allows it to farm tasks out to other Cells it connects to dynamically. One Cell is pretty potent and will likely be able to handle the needs of a typical HDTV so IBM hopes every TV, TiVo, and stereo system has a Cell.
. ars . ars
The cell system workload sharing system is apparently accessible through the general bus so it can theoretically farm tasks out to any Cell on the same network. So if you've got a WiFi network between your PS4, HDTV, TiVo, Stereo, and cell-powered PDA your video games (or PDA) could take advantage of those other devices' unused clock cycles.
Here's some A to RTF.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
IBM ditched their PC business days before they announced the CELL chip was shipping and given the fact that IBM claims the CELL can multiple OSes simultaneously and has 10 or so cores my guess is all you would need to do would be to write virtualizing software for the CELL and then run anything you want on top of that.
Because the CELLs got so much horsepower the user wouldn't notice a performance hit at all!
The CELL if it proves as capable a some claim could very well be an INTEL and more importantly a WINTEL killer.
I think APPLE isn't talking to INTEL about their chips but they are instead talking to IBM about the CELL.
I have an interesting sugestion for IBM:
IBM should release a version of the Cell on a PCI or faster BUS card, or even some sort of crazy processer adapter thingy that one can buy so that Open source programers/users or other interested parties can start using the Cell right away.
The [3D rendering/complex math/video encoding] crowd would love a $200 card that they could just plug in to speed up their rendering buy a factor of 10x.
(1) Port GCC to it, optionally another much more optimized compiler that is compatible with gcc.
(2) Give it to taiwanese motherboard makers to make microatx mobos on the cheap. Aim for $40 for lower speed ones and $100 for full speed Cells.
(3) Put out all the specs of the Cell and any possible firmware sources online, and put them under the BSD license.
(4) Provide licenses to other devleopers to make cheaper versions of the Cell.
(5) Watch Linux and NetBSD grow on it. Watch cisco use it on their high-throughput routers and other manufacturers use it. Watch the app base grow.
(6) Profit!
Alternatively sit on it and let it rot like Palm is doing with BeOS.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The DRM enforcement is inside the CPU itself. Trying to add a mod-chip likely isn't going to work short of replacing the CPU itself. Replacing it with another CELL chip just stick you back in the original DRM jail cell, and trying to replace it with another CPU or with an emluated CELL won't work.
Each Cell is given a GUID, a global identifier, and will come with a crypto-signature authenticating it as a genuine DRM secure chip.
You can't defeat the system without (1) extracting secret keys from each chip one-by-one, or (2) generating a fake crypto signature to falsely authenticate a non-DRM enforcing chip. If you do manage to extract a key from one of the chips and they find out about it, they will place that key on a revokation list and it will become useless. So each chip you manage to rip and extract a key is good for creating one "liberated" system, and you still have to be extremely careful that no one can ever detect that you have done so.
The Pentium 3 unique ID numbers got killed off because of public outrage, and that system was nothing compared to what they've built into the CELL processor. It's about time we see some coverage of this aspect of the chip, and refuse to buy any CELL chips or CELL hardware unless these UNIQUE PROCESSOR IDENTIFIERS are removed.
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Mundane? Considerably faster than pretty much any desktop processor available, 3 cores when Intel and AMD are only just launching dual core units, 3.2Ghz PPC compared to the 2.7 that Apple use now, 1 teraflop in a games console? All that's "mundane"? You need to step away from the supercomputers and come join us in the real world.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Tell me you won't buy the chip due to 'privacy' reasons and I'll explain to you about your VISA card
Go ahead, explain to me how people are given VISA cards and are forbidden to know their own 'key'. Go ahead, explain to me how your VISA card is designed to self destruct and destroy your key and destroy your account and destroy any money in that account if you attempt to read your key from your card.
In case anyone is confused by this, the system is based on RSA keys. That means there are two halves. One half is the public ID number. The other half is the secret key locked inside your chip. It is this secret half that denies you control and ownership of your own computer. It is the secret half they prevents your software from working if you attempt to alter it. It is this secret half that controls and restricts your ability to connect over the internet. It is this secret half that prevents you from reading or altering your own files. The Trusted Computing specification REQUIRES that such DRM enforcement chips be boobytrapped and selfdestruct if you attempt to get your key, and the specification REQUIRES that files be irretrivably lost and any backups be unusable if the chip glitches and loses this key (or if you attempt to read out your key and the chip deliberately destroys it).
This is a million times worse than the old Pentium 3 CPU-IDs.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.