IBM's Radical Cell Processor

Rouslan Solomakhin writes "Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell processor. Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics. Applications in other areas are also considered." From the article: "Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years."

Comments

On the Cell Processor from the source

[javaDragon]

More information about the Cell processor directly from the source : The Cell project at IBM Research

I N F O

[MrEcho.net]

If you want to read more about the CELL heres a link for you...
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/home.html

First Cell product already shipping

[Cybro]

Since the first cell product is already shipping. http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3591350722.html we should be able to benchmark the processor pretty soon and find out if it is all a hype or this really is the second coming :-)

Re:IBM really needs to prove themselves

[talornin]

Acutaly, no.


Much of the reason Apple switched to Intel was because IBM didnt want to make the chips Apple watned.
Apple has for a long time made demands of their chip producers to make this and that chip with this and that feature, then they order a wery low volume at first to ensure they dont get stuck with an overflow should the product flop in any way.
Then they make new, larger, orders if the product is a hit and the chip producer runs into supplying dificulties. Apple blames the chips vendor.
This happened with the 68k, G4 and G5. When Apple wanted new CPU's IBM basicaly told them to get lost because they just wasnt a big enough client to justify the demands they made.

IBM managed quite well before the G5 deal and will manage quite well after.

(Just for the record: This was posted from my darling PowerBook! I am a Mac user and an Apple fanatic! So this is _not_ Apple-bashing, just a statement of facts!)

Re:So how hard is it to program for Cell?

[skeptictank]

Some comments on the first link:

Writing concurrent software isn't that much more difficult than writing single threaded software, as long as you do a good job of partitioning the system into seperate control loops early on. The main difference will be a period of tweaking and adjusting the interplay of the different threads of execution in the system towards the end of development. It's not uncommon for this last stage to take more time than writing the code initially. A tactic that will help a lot is to build an event log into the software from the beginning that can be used to record when each thread finishes doing some processing task. The later version of the freescale 7400 series processor have many features for just this purpose, I would think the ibm 7400 core used in the cell would have the same features, but I am not sure.

A good language to look at for how concurrency can be supported is Ada. There is a lot of good stuff in Ada and a lot of bad stuff in Ada, but the designers did a very good job on the concurrency model.

Re:Bad link?

[antek9]

Try this link to the printable version (should work without being logged in and is nicer anyway, all three pages in one): http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0130/076_print.h tml