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Cell Broadband Engine Docs: VIP Access

Posted by Hemos on from the locking-them-up dept.

I writes "The revolutionary Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) is the result of collaboration among Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. The following papers define the Cell specification and will be posted to the IBM Semiconductor Solutions Technical Library in September. You can access them early as long as you have a current IBM ID."

3 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. IBM ID by wowbagger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Getting and IBM ID is only slightly harder than getting a /. ID - fill in a form, click submit.

    I registered last week at work to get the documentation, though I have not yet had a chance to even take a quick look at it.

    But for what I do (communications and signal processing) the Cell looks really good - I think I could replace several DSPs and protocol processors with one Cell.

    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
  2. Wealth of information but... by ciroknight · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I love IBM for all of the documentation they've provided at this point in time; one could actually start writing code to run on the SPUs right now, and probably only have to do a minimal amount of debugging once they get the hardware.

    But.. that being said, where's the hardware :(? I don't want to buy a PS3-dev kit (even if I could manage to get my hands on one); I just want to make my code fly on those seven SPUs. I wonder if there's an emulator currently available for the Cell processor, does anyone know?

    --
    "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  3. Mutli Proc In General by ezweave · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It seems from TFA that this is really the place where the Cell proc would excell.

    But for more centralized processing, it seems like the world at large is not quite ready for this sort of multi-processing. I have only written assembly for single CPU multi threaded code, but locking problems are enough of a headache in that environ.

    A little O/T perhaps, but with the hope to use multicore procs as CPUs, does Vista/Longhorn seem even more... I don't know, maybe under-developed? From my limited experience, even with a CPU mutli-proc system coded properly you are really just speeding up locking problems (i.e. the same problems exist for synchronus bits of code, it just does it alot faster), like for I/O or HD access. Again, my experience with working at that low a level in a multi-proc environ are limited (basically non-existent).

    I guess my question is, wouldn't the SW world need to do some rethinking to develop consumer level apps that use multi-proc capabilities? That of course assumes that you could compile "multi-proc" code for the Cell or multi-core systems (perhaps this is me misunderstanding the cell proc).

    Then, aside from Linux or Darwin (I assume Darwin would work as multi-proc G5s are shipping now), what OS could hack it at a consumer level?

    (This may get modded as O/T, but I think it's related to the Cell as a signal proc discussion.)