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Linux For Cell Processor Workstation
News for nerds writes "The Cell processor from Sony, Toshiba and IBM, has been known as the chip that powers the upcoming PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system, but except for that very little is known about how it's applied to a real use. This time, at LinuxTag 2005 from 22nd to 25rd June 2005, at Messe- und Kongresszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany, Arnd Bergmann of IBM will speak about the Cell Processor programming model under Linux, and the Linux kernel in the first Cell Processor-based workstation computer, which premieres at Linuxtag 2005."
but except for that very little is known about how it's applied to a real use.
And why are video games not considered to be "real use" ??
Can't wait!
What has impressed me about Linux is not so much that it has enabled some sort of "software revolution", but rather in how it has given chip/platform makers a specific, generic target OS that they can use freely to get something useful running on their hardware quickly.
It used to be the case that platform makers would have to either develop their own minimal operating system for testing purposes or work very closely with an OS maker to port their software to the new hardware platform. With Linux, this has been pushed into the anals of history. Now the Linux OS porting goes hand in hand with platform building, as evidenced by the almost immediate support for Linux at the time of hardware release.
I'm not so much interested in how the Cell board is going to revolutionize anything (it won't), but in how we have, in just the past few years, seen a dramatic increase in the number of hardware platforms being released. And not just in numbers, but also in variety. The number of different types of hardware platforms has risen dramatically. It's only limitation is the number of chip instruction sets supported by gcc and the imaginations of hardware manufacturers.
If you want to see how Microsoft's monopoly has hurt the computer industry, look no further than the current industry. Whereas hardware platforms were pretty standardized and boring, now, with Linux (and real competition to Microsoft's hegemony) the numbers of innovative platforms has increased dramatically. We need a Microsoft out there developing consumer-level applications and quality, user-friendly operating systems. However, we also need a real competitor like Linux to push the giant into innovating.
We are fast approaching an era where you'll be able to run any OS and any software you want on any architecture you want.
Too bad that at LinuxTag 2005 all you will get to see is a looped video on running "real time" on "similar hardware" simulating the great development advanced you will be able to achieve with the new cell processor.
Maybe the old man face and duck in water tech demos from the PS2 will also appear.. Did any PS2 game ever look as good as sonys techdemos?
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
You could always try clicking this then
Cell info
In the end, It's all bovine dung you know
"Unlike existing SMP systems or multi-core chips, only the general purpose PowerPC core, is able to run a generic operating system, while the SPUs are specialized on running computational tasks. Porting Linux to run on Cells PowerPC core is a relatively easy task because of the similarities to existing platforms like IBM pSeries or Apple Power Macintosh, but does not give access to the enormous computing power of the SPUs.
Only the kernel is able to directly communicate with an SPU and therefore needs to abstract the hardware interface into system calls or device drivers. The most important functions of the user interface including loading a program binary into an SPU, transferring memory between an SPU program and a Linux user space application and synchronizing the execution. Other challenges are the integration of SPU program execution into existing tools like gdb or oprofile."
I really hope that Cell will boost IBM since in the last few monthes they sold their Personal Computers department to Lenovo and have lost their partnership with Apple for PPC processors. I really think IBM has still a lot to give to the IT world and it would be a real waste to loose their know-how!
What's the point of better architectures when Apple is moving to the brain-fucked x86 ISA? It's hard to be enthusiastic about computing when you know the beast just got a new lease on life.
Perhaps you are in the wrong business or hobby. If inconsequential details like what CPU is sitting at the heart of Apple's proprietary design causes you emotional distress you really need to reconsider your life. Assuming of course that you are not in advertising and needed the faux x86/PPC conflict. If so please continue with your distress, otherwise, have you considered forestry?
http://data2.itc.nps.gov/digest/usajobs.cfm
The cell is amazing it will-
- optimize seamless communities
- generate vertical e-services
- everage synergistic convergence
and best of all
- engage e-business content
Perfect solution
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Oh wow, I don't know where to start.
1. Relevance: This comment has absolutely no relevance to the slashdot article.
2. Open-source software sucks compared to closed-source because it's not done by 'professionals'? Give me a break! Several open-source projects are funded by companies, organizations, and universities and are recognized world-wide.
3. You're saying you can't use those programs because of their silly names which you somehow derived as sexual euphemisms? What about windows cause it kinda sounds something like dildos LOL!
4. You're comparing programming to prostitution while discussing the lack of professionalism -- how very... professional!
I watched the keynote, and Apple (Mr. Jobs) did a really good job selling the transition. The only advantage of Intel is gigahumungous manufacturing capacity, which IBM obviously wasn't willing to steer Apple's way. PowerPC is good and all...up to the point of there being no road map or a stubborn IBM negotiator.
Consoles are where PowerPC is at from here on out.
Look at the kernel mailing lists, IBM already submited the first set of patches. Basically Linux runs on the PPE, the full PPC core inside the cell, and there are system calls to execute special SPE binaries running on the SPEs (the subprocessors).
Jan
The IBM Cell workstations used for PS3 dev run a version of the Linux kernel to handle development I/O tasks: file transfers, communications with the PC host, starting/restarting programs etc. The game itself does not run in a Linux environment.
This is similar to the T10K PS2 devkits running Linux (on a separate X86 processor) to do similar purposes.
As with the PS2, the consumer PS3 console itself uses a custom bare-bones kernel; it is NOT Linux based, although I could certainly see Linux being ported to it, like Sony did with the PS2.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
The Cell architecture was developed with powerful and complex math applications in mind. How will existing Linux applications perform on it? It seems to me that the Cell's strengths are not integer math and general purpose computing, so in theory only floating-point intensive and vector applications can get a real kick out of it. There are not many well known applications with these characteristics.
That said, advances in parallelizing or vectorizing tasks within the kernel or popular applications are possible, but that's not a trivial task, so at first glance Cell's Linux benchmarks could look unimpressive or misleading, even though the architecture itself is revolutionary, at least in theory.
Here I hope IBM has done their homework and show something really impressive, yet realistic. I want to see things like Apache and GD serving hundreds of thousands of requests for dynamic content, or some real-time encoding/compositing of MPEG4 video for scalable delivery. I want to see Maya or Lightwave rendering a very complex scene. Rubber ducks may be fun to look at and -in all fairness- fit for a videogame-oriented crowd, but I want to see some kick-ass performance based on what it can potentially do to application development.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
That function name is way too long and descriptive. The acutal name would be something like addfunmemdestaddavsize().
And that would be followed by a series of non-sensical parameters which can be defaulted to NULL and everything still seems to work fine.
As for your question, that's why they make the big bucks and you are posting on Slashdot. If you knew the answer, you'd be working for them.
Sounds like it belongs in an addon then. Not in a generic environment. Video, sound and 3D vector ops have very little in commen with, say, SQL queries.
0x86 chips have added silicon AFTER, not BEFORE Microsoft created all of their sound and video extensions. Unlike the implication of GP. And MMX was a response to the fact that 'omg! People use video and sound!'. Linux and anyone else is free to take advantage of the extra instructions, and is the case with Linux at least.
If Cell doesn't have special instructions for doing quaternion rotations then I don't give a crap how fast it is: an Intel/AMD/0x86 chip will walk all over it in video operations.
And even if Cell does... can that make it a great generic OS processor? Nope! Takes a lot more than that!
As in everything, time will tell. I certainly do hope that it is a revolution; I foresee living through very few GOOD revolutions during my lifetime. The more the merrier.
Cheap, but limited.
--
Evan "My first computer was an S100 bus handbuilt. My first OS wasn't."
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If inconsequential details like what CPU is sitting at the heart of Apple's proprietary design causes you emotional distress you really need to reconsider your life.
This is Slashdot, man. If we had a "life" to reconsider, we wouldn't be here.
I don't need a signature.
Those SPEs will be pretty useful for massaging and distilling large streams of data, which should make the cell great at tasks like video recognition and real-time market analysis. The cell may not be that revolutionary as parallelism has been touted in academia for a long time now, but the DSP like capabilities + parallelism will make the cell much more capable of responding quickly to complex sensory input than commodity hardware currently allows.
I picture the PS3 using a camera as a very flexible form of input to allow for more creative game design. Super-fast compression and decompression also come to mind, which could be useful for more complex and fluid internet play.
Recent articles have said the cell will have some hickups with physics and AI, because those tasks benefit from branch prediction, but this should be made up for by the fact that the cell will be able to recognize input at a far more human level than present technology affords.
If the SPUs can be harnessed or even parts of/entire OS's rewritten to utilise the chip properly Cell could wipe the floor with anything Intel could come up with.
t ails.html?talkid=156
The SPUs are not for the OS, they are for high level libraries or apps. They are for highly specialized computationally intensive jobs. Maybe OpenGL could benefit but not the OS. FYI:
"Unlike existing SMP systems or multi-core chips, only the general purpose PowerPC core, is able to run a generic operating system, while the SPUs are specialized on running computational tasks. Porting Linux to run on Cells PowerPC core is a relatively easy task because of the similarities to existing platforms like IBM pSeries or Apple Power Macintosh, but does not give access to the enormous computing power of the SPUs. Only the kernel is able to directly communicate with an SPU and therefore needs to abstract the hardware interface into system calls or device drivers. The most important functions of the user interface including loading a program binary into an SPU, transferring memory between an SPU program and a Linux user space application and synchronizing the execution. Other challenges are the integration of SPU program execution into existing tools like gdb or oprofile."
http://www.linuxtag.org/typo3site/freecongress-de
Is this supposed Cell/Linux workstation something we actually know jack squat about it, or is it just IBM going "uh, we're gonna make one of these... someday"? Can we make any educated guesses based on what IBM usually does?
Specifically, is this, like, something that will be actually in the affordable range for people, or is this going to be like some kind of $6000 near-server tank?
Also, how many Cells is this likely to have? One? Two? Four? These SPEs are all well and good for computational stuff but the rest of the time it's nice not to be stuck with a single processor.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
With all the continuing good news about the evolution of the PPC, including the Cell processor, I find it hard to believe that Apple has choosen now to move to Intel chips... and the developer workstations are only 32bit no less (I think they could have at least gone with AMD64).
The good news is that someone is at least taking advantage of the architecture and producing linux workstations based on the Cell... unfortunately i don't think tht will be enough for it to survive in the desktop/workstation market. I fear that unless Microsoft ends up releasing a new PPC version of Windows (which i consider unlikely at best), PPC is soon to be relegated to Servers, Gaming Stations and the embedded market only.
I think the fact that Apple have switched to x86 at this point could very well mean that they've seen the Cell, and it's no where near as good as it's supposed to be.
I have a better idea. I'll send you my address and you send your worthless G5 to me! I'll even pay postage!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Maybe Apple would like to use a nice IBM chip :-)
When you had some new hardware, you bought a (relatively cheap) Unix source license, and had something running fast
Linux is better though, because the GPL encourage hardware vendors to share their modifications.
With Unix all you had access to was the original source, and the ports done by non-commercial/academic groups (source as UCB). Not other vendors code.
I have news for you,... we programmers have been letting the hardware designers have FAR too much fun for far too long! It wasn't until my recent retirement from more than 35 years of computer programming (I've had many different titles) that I've had the time to learn the Verilog hardware design language - and it's GREAT FUN!!! :-) Verilog is very liberating because it removes the boring sequential execution of most CPU's and provides a clean slate with which to design any sort of little tiny electronics machine (that's how I think of VLSI design) that my heart desires. There is a GPLed version of SystemC (a higher level hardware design language than Verilog) on SourceForge that I've been meaning to take a look at, but first I'm creating a 640 bit-wide(!!!) factoring machine in Verilog which I hope to fit into one of the Lattice or Altera FPGA parts.
Really, I highly encourage programmers or anyone interested to learn and use Verilog or some other high level hardware design language. Verilog is similar in many ways to the C language, so if you're familiar with C then you already know most of Verilog's operators, precedence rules, etc. The only thing that takes a little getting used to is Verilog's inherently parallel nature. That is both its strength and the source of most Verilog design errors (at least for me). Also, Verilog is even more bit-picky than C but I sort of actually prefer the extra control that languages like C and Verilog give me over the hardware versus languages that try to insulate me from it.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
The Cell also is simple, but in a way that that inflates the gflop rating at the cost of programmer time.
By comparison the modern x86 is a dream to program for, just note how two fairly radically different cpu's (Athlon64 and the P4) handle the same code very nicely without any big performance issues. Compare this to the Cell, where all the explicitness will make sure that any binary you write for the Cell today will run like crap on the next version.
The point here is that Apple could absolutely not have switched to the Cell, it is inconvenient now and hopeless to upgrade without having to rewrite a ton of assembler and recompile everything for the new explicit requirements.
The Cell is the thing for number crunching and pro applications where they are willing to spend the time optimizing for every single CPU, but for normal developers it is a step back.
I was talking to a friend about this new Cell processor they were going to have in the PS3, that was supposed to have all these nifty new capabilities, and he was looking at me like I'd grown another head. I asked him why he was looking at me so oddly, and he said, "Dude, Celerons are not that good."
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
In case you don't remember, the point of RISC was to put optimization on the compiler so it wouldn't require massive on-the-fly speculative bibbledy-bop with millions of extra transistors and hideous pipelines like we have nowadays. This was done by providing, essentially, a compiler-accessible cache in the form of lots of registers, and by having an instruction set that was amenable to automated optimization.
In theory, you don't need any GP registers at all, you could just have memory-memory ops and rely on the cache. This is impractical due to the size of memory addresses eating up your bandwidth (incidentally, this is a problem with RISC architectures, eating bandwidth and clogging the cache, but that's another story). As an alternative, you can simply expose the cache as one big honking register file using somewhat smaller addresses, and let your fancy-pants optimizing compiler do its best.
The real problem seems to be that compilers have just not been able to keep up with the last 20 years of theory. Witness the Itanium--in theory it should have been the ultimate, but they didn't seem to be able to get things optimized for it (other problems, too). Then what happens are curmudgeons complain about the extra work of optimization and insist on setting us back to early 80s architecture rather than writing a decent compiler.
Moral of the story: write a decent compiler and stop trying to glorify crappy ISAs that suit your antiquated and inefficient coding habits.
Oh wow, I don't know where to start.
There's only one thing worse than repetitive, uncreative, irrelevant trolls.
It's the fucktards that reply to them on a point-by-point basis as if it does anything other than justifying the trolling.
Next time you feel the need to reply to such a lame, obvious troll, try sucking your own cock instead. It's an endeavor that will doubtless keep you occupied for days and be far less distasteful to onlookers.
I doubt this is the result of a 5 year plan simply because Jobs loves Intel. That's just pure insanity.
The other possibility is that Apple have got seriously pissed off watching IBM spew out the 3-core G5 for the XBox 360, the Cell for the PS3, and leaving them with an aging 2.7GHz CPU.
You confuse "Real Use" with "Real Work". You can "use" a lot of stuff, without it counting as "work".
E.g., you get some real use out of your bed at home, but I wouldn't say sleeping there counts as "work". (Or if it does, where can I sign up to get paid for it?) And screwing doesn't really count as work for most people either.
E.g., you get some real use out of your TV, but most people don't get paid to watch TV, nor consider it "work".
Same here. Playing a game _is_ "real use" of a computer. It might not be "work", but "use" it is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
x86_64 has 16 GPRs and 16 XMM [simd] registers.
...] but dies off quick after that.
I think you'll find the gains from 16 extra registers is less than what the [for example] AMD gains from having three pipelines, register file, etc...
It's like cache, throwing more registers pays off big to start [say going from 1 to 2, 2 to 4,
Take apart that 5% of your program that takes 95% of the time and see how many registers it actually uses in the inner loop.
With bignum math for instance, inner loops usually amount to 3 registers for an accumulator, 1 for a step counter, 2 for source pointers and 1 for an outer loop counter, 7 registers in total...
Take the EM64T case, it implements x86_64 as well but AMD still pwnz it bad. Why? Well let's see, three [not one] dedicated decoders, three ALU pipelines with 8-step schedulers [re parallelism], etc...
Intel still pwnz AMD when it comes to SSE2 and memory ops but that gap has been closing with every new AMD release [AMD64 for instance has more SSE2 opcodes implemented as directpath instead of MicroROM] where in the Intel camp their cpus haven't really been getting ANY better...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I'd even take it a step further; by going cross-platform with the OS, and abstracting the binary compatibility issue away with XCode and Rosetta, they are now no longer beholden to any chipmaker. Intel is probably giving them a sweet deal (they are a pretty high-volume seller, after all), but should that deteriorate, they can always go over to AMD. Or back to IBM for power/cell chips. And in fact, they can do all at once....if they decide they want to have pentium-M in the laptops, cell in the desktops, and opterons in the servers, no problem.
That's so far the only way I can view Apple's move yesterday that makes any sense to me. This is more than just another archetecture move...it's a move above archetectures.
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