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

they gave up...

[YesIAmAScript]

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.