Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Wow ... by JMZorko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... all those _registers_ make me salivate! One of the coolest things about the RCA1802 (the processor I learned on) compared to others in its' time was that it had _loads_ of registers when compared to a 6502 or 8085. It spoiled me, though ... when I started exploring those other CPUs, I always thought "Huh? Where are all of the registers?"

    So yes, I want a Cell-based devkit now, 'cuz this sounds like _fun_ :-)

    Regards,

    John

    --
    Falling You - beautiful
  2. Re:PS3 Suggestion by rpdillon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Every PS3 hard drive is shipping with Linux onboard.

  3. they gave up... by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Both Sony and MS realized they couldn't make a single true general-purpose CPU with the performance they wanted for a price they could afford to sell in their consoles.

    Sony went to a CPU, GPU and 7 co-processors (Cell).
    MS went to a 3 CPUs with vector-assist and a GPU.

    Both companies are going to need to spend a lot of time and money on developer tools to help their developers more easily take advantage of their oddball hardware, or else they will end up right where Saturn did.

    I guess the good news for both companies is that there is no alternative (like PS1 was to Saturn) which is straightforward and thus more attractive.

    PS2 requires programming a specialized CPU with localized memory (the Emotion Engine) and it seems to get by okay. So developers can adapty, given sufficient financial advange to doing so.

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95