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IBM-Sony-Toshiba Reveal New Cell Processor Details

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

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."

5 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Synergistic Processor Units? by ponds · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Synergistic Processor Units? by ameline · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not just buzzword compliant, but confusing as hell for those of us who have been in the know for a while.

      To me, SPU always made me think "Scalar Processing unit", while PPE made me think "Parallel Processing Element".

      Of course that's exactly backwards.

      That, and I choke on words like "synergistic" because they peg my bullshiat-o-meter way off in the red.

      In my opinion one of the coolest features of this architecture are the way the reciprocal estimate and reciprocal square root estimate instructions work.

      In a single cycle you get 13 good bits of precision -- with the low order bits filled with information to be used by the floating point interpolate instruction.

      You can get a full precision (32 bit ieee float) reciprocal in about 6 cycles, and a 1/sqrt in 7 or so. Oh, and that's 4 results in that time. Averaging 1.5 cycles per FP divide, and slightly more for sqrt. times 7, times 3.2 billion per second, and the bandwidth to feed it.

      That's several orders of magnitide faster that you could do with any x86 part out there.

      --
      Ian Ameline
  2. Linux is everywhere. by 8086ed · · Score: 5, Funny

    And yes, Cell runs Linux.

    First thing I thought of when I read it was "Duh."

    I run Linux on my toaster.

    ... I said that as a joke, but to be sure it hadn't been done, I googled it. I was wrong.

  3. Developers is developers! by greythax · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Re:Some other info: by recycledpork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?