Unleashing the Power of the Cell Broadband Engine

An anonymous reader writes "IBM DeveloperWorks is running a paper from the MPR Fall Processor Forum 2005 explores programming models for the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor, from the simple to the progressively more advanced. With nine cores on a single die, programming for the CBE is like programming for no processor you've ever met before."

Comments

Cell architecture

[rd4tech]

The Cell Architecture grew from a challenge posed by Sony and Toshiba to provide power-efficient and cost-effective high-performance processing for a wide range of applications, including the most demanding consumer appliance: game consoles. Cell - also known as the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) - is an innovative solution whose design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in areas such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics, fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), matrix operations, and scientific workloads. As an example of innovation that ensures the clients' success, a team from IBM Research joined forces with teams from IBM Systems Technology Group, Sony and Toshiba, to lead the development of a novel architecture that represents a breakthrough in performance for consumer applications. IBM Research participated throughout the entire development of the architecture, its implementation and its software enablement, ensuring the timely and efficient application of novel ideas and technology into a product that solves real challenges; More...

Re:Has nothing to do with Broadband

[Guilly]

I would assume they call it broadband because the 8 SPE's can communicate to each other over a 100GB/s link (called the Element Interconnect Bus -- yes, that's 100GB not 100Gb) and also because it provides plenty of SIMD instructions.

Oh yeah. If you read their web page they also mention the Cell processor will be able to handle broadband rich media applications and streaming content:
The first-generation Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor is a multi-core chip comprised of a 64-bit Power Architecture processor core and eight synergistic processor cores, capable of massive floating point processing, optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications.

Re:PS3 Suggestion

[spoonboy42]

The PS3 has 512M of memory by default. It is half Rambus XDR and half GDDR3, but both segments of memory can be addressed by both the processor and the GPU.

Re:Has nothing to do with Broadband

[Anonymous Coward]

Frequency division multiplexing of multiple signals for transmission over a medium, such as coaxial cable.

Mambo development

[iota]

Development for the Cell is open. You are free to download IBM's Cell Simulator.

Written in C, a significant part of the Full-System Simulator's simulation capability is directly attributed to its simulation multitasking framework component. Developed as a robust, high-performance alternative to conventional process and thread programming, the multitasking framework is a lightweight, multitasking scheduling framework that provides a complete set of facilities for creating and scheduling threads, manipulating time delays, and applying a variety of interthread communication policies and mechanisms to simulation events.

The simulator runs a Redhat kernel, so the programming model will be familiar. Also both SCE's (gcc-based) and IBM's (XLC) compilers are available for both the PPU and SPU.

IBM will also be releasing Cell-based Blade servers next year, so pick one up if you're serious about development!

MOD PARENT DOWN

[imroy]

Note to moderators: the user "5, Troll" likes to cut and paste posts from other sites to gain karma. This one was found on the DeveloperWorks site with a quick google search.

Re:HLL like Java & Smalltalk have two faults

[TheRaven64]

Java and Smalltalk are both imperative languages and, while I am quite fond of Smalltalk, my post was about functional languages. Most functional languages don't permit aliasing, which dramatically reduces locking issues related to resource contention (and copy-on-write optimisations can make them very fast).

Re:PS3 Suggestion

[TheGSRGuy]

2.5" drives don't have to be slow. Most laptops ship with 5400rpm (or even worse, 4200rpm) drives. I paid to upgrade to a 7200RPM drive w/8MB cache in my Dell notebook. Huge speed jump. You can even get 2.5" drives with 16MB caches. That would offer a significant speed bost.

Frankly, I don't see why they couldn't just use flash memory instead...everyone's doing it these days.