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

Re:New Me

[NanoGator]

"I just want to draw a flowchart and have the compiler and realtime scheduler distribute processes and data among the hardware resources. If we are getting a new architecture and new "programming models", and therefore new compilers and kernels, how about a new IDE paradigm."

Bingo, sir.

Wow ...

[JMZorko]

... 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

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:PS3 Suggestion

[rpdillon]

Every PS3 hard drive is shipping with Linux onboard.

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!

Re:ps3 programming

[iota]

from the article and if the ps3 cell cpu is even half the processor than this monster is i say that game companies will need a lot of real programmers to make real good games (as if they cared).

1. Some of us do care, actually.
2. The Cell processor described is exactly the processor in the PS3.
3. Yes, regardless of what some would like to believe, there is no magic. It's different, but it's the way things are going, so some of us are adapting the way develop. It'll take work, and maybe a little time, but that's always been our job - we get hardware and we figure out how to do something cool with it.
4. It is actually really fun to work on and very impressive.

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.

Re:Has nothing to do with Broadband

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Simply because IBM mentions broadband doesn't mean it has anything to do with system-to-system data transmission. This sounds a bit like Intel's marketing of "shiny new Pentiums make the Internet faster."

"The Pentium III will make the Internet a much more consumer-friendly environment," says Jami Dover, Intel's marketing vice president. Surfing today, Dover maintains, is a limited experience because data-transfer rates over ordinary telephone lines do not allow for high-quality audio, video and 3D graphics. "You take people raised on TV and show them a flat, text [Web] page," says Dover. "It's quite a juxtaposition." I guess Intel was hoping the world could go through a phone line with enough compression.

To us this is a nitpick, to the general public this is more confusion in a jargon filled marketplace.

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:CBE = Failure

[plalonde2]

You're right - you don't design around a new processor.

But you should design around the changes in architecture that have been coming at us for the last 5-10 years: the bus is the bottleneck, and the Cell makes this explicit. It goes so far as to deal with the clock-rate limits we've reached by taking the basic "bus is the limit" and exposing it in a way that lets you stack a bunch of processors without excessive interconnect hardware (and associated heat) into a more power-efficient chip.

I've been working on Cell for nearly a year now, and it's been really nice being forced to pay attention to the techniques that will be required to get performance on all multi-core machines, which in essence means all new processors coming out. Our bus/clockrate/heat problems are all inter-dependent, and Cell is the first project I've seen that gets serious about letting programmers know they need to change to adapt to this new space.