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IBM-Sony-Toshiba Reveal New Cell Processor Details
BBCWatcher writes "The three main partners in the Cell Processor initiative announced technical details of the new architecture. IBM's documents are particularly revealing. There's much more information on how developers, including open source developers, can access the SPUs (Synergistic Processor Units). As reported earlier, Sony will put the Cell into every Playstation 3 game machine, due early next year. And yes, Cell runs Linux."
Anandtech has a great article going over the Cell as well.
Probably isn't quite as in-depth, though.
Yes http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1 727&page=2
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -Heinlein
IBM = evil soul-stealing registration-required site
Sony = http://cell.scei.co.jp/ in EN and JP
According to http://cell.scei.co.jp/index_e.html:
...
Today's announcement is the next major milestone in the Cell project, which began with the formation of the STI (SCEI, Sony, Toshiba and IBM) Cell Design Center in Austin, Texas in March of 2001.
By opening up a wide set of technical specifications to software developers, business partners, academic and research organizations, and potential customers, SCEI, Sony, Toshiba and IBM continue their work to aggressively stimulate the creation of Cell-based applications.
There you go, SCEI, Sony, Toshiba, and IBM all engaged in aggressive stimulation. You heard it here first.
*SCEI = Sony Computer Entertainment Inc
The Register has details on the PS3 chip's manufacturers...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/24/sony_samp
http://cell.scei.co.jp/e_download.html
I heard a rumor awhile back that the PS3 will be running a stripped down version of Linux, ...
Eh? Stripped down Linux? It's just customized linux. eg. they have it ported to Cell and have some weird periphernalia supported (likely half-assed and builtin as contra to modules). It may be that they don't have X running (though in theory they could be running Xgl if PS3 is really such an OpenGl bunny) and use plain OpenGl to draw all applications (eg. dvd-player + other non-game content).
Actually Xgl may be not such a bad idea. Nokia liked GTK+ well enough to use it on 711, (with nice polished theme of course). Using ready made UI libraries would save a great amount of time in development.
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
How do you program those SPUs, besides hand-coded assembly ?
With the Cell compiler, of course!
I would recommend that you read the specs. This is indeed a truly revolutionary processor. In fact what you get is 9 processors in a single chip, but instead of the classical SMP, you get 1 PPE that is optimized to run an OS (basically a PowerPC core), and 8 SPE's that are optimized for media rich applications (which of course includes heavy math ones too) but can not run an OS.
The PPE has full access the the main memory, while the SPE's only have direct access to local 256Kb memory areas that you can use at L1 cache speeds, but the best part is that you can use DMA transfers from the main memory to the local SPE's one, so the PPE does not even have to bother assisting the other ones on that.
Also, although other posters seem to think that the Linux port is trivial, it is not. Adding the support for the 8 SPE's required a great deal of imagination from the IBM engineers. I really liked the way they solved this problem too (more information on the original documents).
I heard a rumor awhile back that the PS3 will be running a stripped down version of Linux, ...
.but a cool one.
According to Sony's Ken Kutaragi, his plan was to pre-install a version of linux onto each HDD unit that ships, so it will be recognized as a computer, rather than a mere console. A marketing ploy? Most likely. .
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23878
Yeah, and so does whatever the PS2 contains, but information about getting linux on your PS2 is pretty sparse.
Ummm... how about just buying a kit straight from Sony?
Sony has already said they will have something similar for the PS3.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yes it does, cell's PPE is basically a PowerPc 970 (aka G5).
(no soul-stealing link-click reading-text required)
no...
It's quite startling how many people here think Syergistic is a meaningless buzzword.
& q=define:synergistic&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en
No, it actually means that they aren't full fledged processing cores like a regular CPU. That's what I thought when I saw it too though heh.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Those estimate instructions did not place useful information in the low order bits of the estimate. Those processors did not have an instruction whose only porpose was to process those special low order bits to produce more accurate results. This aspect of Cell is really new.
Ian Ameline
After having read the anandtech article mentioned previously in this thread, a quote:
Unfortunately, seeing a future for Cell far outside of Playstation 3 and Sony/Toshiba CE devices is difficult at best.
Perhaps for the people at Anandtech but it's times like these that I feel badly for all those rendering houses and farms that built their systems off SGI's or clusters of expensive opterons/xeons/itaniums. The Cell is basically a very advanced DSP that performs extremely well at rendering and SIMD algorithms (floating point calcuations). A farm of PS3's could easily do what much more expensive grids do.
Such a system could also be used for doing parallel calculations in various scientific applications.