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Unleashing the Power of the Cell Broadband Engine

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the wish-my-brain-had-nine-cores dept.

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."

4 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Has nothing to do with Broadband by Guilly · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:PS3 Suggestion by spoonboy42 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
    Andy Grove: "Not Much."
  3. Mambo development by iota · · Score: 4, Informative
    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!
  4. MOD PARENT DOWN by imroy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.