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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."
oh, here are my glasses...
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -Heinlein
Synergistic Processor Units
OK, who let the marketroids in the lab?
Synergistic Processor Units?
That's it, the Playstation 3 will definately win the next console war due to exploiting its Synergistic Processor units and developing core competencies to sustain a long-term competitive advantage in the new paradigm. Now that word is out on the blogosphere, Microsoft should just give up.
Bingo, BTW.
So when can i buy a 'pc' based on these things...
Or even a development board..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't forget to chain enough PS3's together to enable the "Sarah Connor" easter egg.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
IBM = evil soul-stealing registration-required site
Sony = http://cell.scei.co.jp/ in EN and JP
Meyer: Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? [backpedaling] Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that. [pause] I'm fired, aren't I? Myers: Oh, yes.
it's parts of the goku, vegeta, freeza, king cold, piccolo, tienshinhan processors put together into one super processor
in other news, rumors spread about Intel's new gohan processor
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
And yes, Cell runs Linux.
... I said that as a joke, but to be sure it hadn't been done, I googled it. I was wrong.
First thing I thought of when I read it was "Duh."
I run Linux on my toaster.
They finally have a TLA with "synergy" in it... doesn't that Godwin the technology, or something?
Incidentally, are they fresh spu? Most civilized people can't stomach spu fresh.
sic transit gloria mundi
I heard a rumor awhile back that the PS3 will be running a stripped down version of Linux, just like the XBox/XBox 360 run a stripped down version of Win 2k. It does seem to make sence since the Cell processor runs Linux and NVIDIA(the PS3 will use a NVIDIA graphics card) has been known for great Linux and OpenGL support(I also heard all PS3 games will use OpenGL).
Sony offered Linux on the PS2 partly as PR stunt, partly as a way to offer a cheaper dev system than their $100K dedicated HW. But they distributed it with only a proprietary "BIOS"/bootloader, which meant developers couldn't distribute bootable discs even if they blew off the license which said they weren't allowed to, not without Sony's approval. And they distributed their proprietary boot disc only bundled with their $200 ethernet/HD. Plus it only worked with a select few "sync on green" monitors. So the whole thing was mostly a really tiny niche hobby, rather than a new Linux architecture. Let's hope Linux on PS3 has a chance to play with the big dogs.
--
make install -not war
So it will be utilizing synergy. That's good. I like my solutions to be customer-focused, and above all synergized. :)
You are not the customer.
There's much more information on how developers, including open source developers...
HOW DARE YOU! You can't include open source developers as a sub category of developers! When you say developers, you better mean closed source developers! We don't let that open source scum use our compilers and such, so we refuse to let the word "developers" mean "all developers". Don't you go insinuating that it should include OTHER TYPES OF DEVELOPERS when we say DEVELOPERS!
And while we are at it, Perl Developers aren't developers either. Lump them in the cryptographers, we don't want them.
SPU? Sounds like something I do every few saturday nights, after ingesting too many alco-beverages.....
Earlier in the design, the SPU's were called Streaming Processing Units (you know like SSE, Streming SIMD Extensions). However, they didn't want to give the impression that the SPU's were designed only for "streaming data" kind of tasks, so they decided to change its name.
;)
:)
I guess "SPU" had already stuck with the developer team, so they just switched the word to "some meaningless word with S" so they could keep the acronym. And as far as meaningless words with S go, "Synergistic" fits the bill quite nicely.
After the fact, of course, they can let the marketroids make up explanations on how the name is actually about the "synergy" between the main processor and the SPUs, blah blah blah...
The filesystem is the package manager
Not to be a buzz kill, but it looks like we'll have to wait for a lot of development and middle ware maturity before we see the real potential in cell processors.
Yes, but why worry about something so trivial when we've got anti-gravity technology?
http://www.blachford.info/quantum/gravity.html
And faster than light travel?
http://www.blachford.info/quantum/fastlight.html
Blachford is just as qualified to talk about processor technology as he is about physics. He's an attention seeking charlatan lacking either the experience or qualifications to contribute anything but hype and bullshit. And he's becoming just as ubiquitous and irritating as that Piquapelle prick.
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.
Probably isn't quite as in-depth, though.
How the fuck did a post which explicitly states it has less information that the main story get modded Informative?
- w00t?
So what you're saying is I should avoid buying anything that you buy, in fear that it might go down in flames due to it having an "interesting architecture"? :)
Karnal
I just downloadded all of the Cell pdf's to take a look at them. I posted the following analysis to news:comp.arch:
...
Naturally, I started reading the SPU asm manual, and that makes it
immediately obvious that this is a cpu directly targeted at MPEG style
video processing:
absdb Absolute difference of bytes
avgb Average bytes: dest = (a+b+1) >> 1 (MPEG interpolation)
ct Carry Generate: Target = carry out of (A+B)
addx Add word extended: Target = A+B+(Target & 1)
Notice the last one! It uses the least significant bit of each part of
the target register as input to an AddWithCarry operation, which means
that you need three read ports.
This pair of opcodes seems to me to be meant as building blocks for
extended/arbitrary precision calculations.
It has a full set of branch instructions that as a side-effect either
enable or disable interrupts, i.e. critical sections are supposed to be
handled this way.
It seems to handle sub-register size operations with a set of opcodes,
where one of a group of GenerateMask operations is used to generate an
input mask for a general shuffle operation.
There's a bunch of generalized three-input FMAC opcodes, all working on
SIMD data, like fnms (T = Acc - (a * b).
It has fsqest and frest to generate approximate reciprocal square root
and reciprocal lookup values. However, these operations does not seem to
deliver results in a standard format, instead each resulting element
consists of two parts, a base and a step, so that a following fi
(Floating Interpolate) can improve upon the table lookup results.
I'm guessing you'd then want one NR iteration to get somewhere close to
IEEE single precision.
The shufb (Shuffle bytes) opcode seems like a small extension to the
Altivec Permute, in that in addition to using 5 bits to select one of 32
possible input bytes, and can also specify three different immediate
values (0, 0x80 and 0xFF), which would be needed to make it work with
the GenerateMask operations mentioned above.
All in all a pretty general set of opcodes for SIMD data processing, it
is particularly obvious in the way each of the possible operations has
forms to work on either a set of input data (reg or immediate), or on
it's complement. This saves a lot of bubble-introducing mask setup
operations, but is normally not considered to be required on a regular cpu.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"