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."

2 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. Re:Has nothing to do with Broadband by ScottCooperDotNet · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.