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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."
**Outside the Sony Booth being handed fisherman's waders**
[Gabe]: What are these waders for?
[Tycho]: My guess? All the bullshit
It's not that I don't think this chip might be as fantastic as everyone says but since Sony has basically lied out its ass for its past 3 consoles, I'm not giving it the benefit of the doubt with the PS3 and god save any journalist who gets sucked into their schilling.
>Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality game
hum...
more like:
Rumours and hype about playstation 3 intended to reduce sales of Xbox 360.
nothing to see here...
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
They do? Last time I looked, IBM processors were inside all the current "next generation" consoles. To me, it looks like IBM is the surest winner in the next/current/upcoming (pick your perspective) round of console wars. As an AC already pointed out, Apple mus have been a really low-volume customer for IBM, and probably a picky one at that.
Apple was defiantly a low volume buyer but they were a big source of free marketing . Now with the recent upsurge in consumer products using the PPC chips IBM does not need apple as much and apple definitely does not need IBM , so all is well for both companies
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Really? Just like the PS1/2 could do on the fly Toy Story quality graphics? Or did you just get around that by saying movie quality games, rather than games that look like movies, but still implied it?
I have no doubt the cell is going to be impressive, but we are quite along way away from an affordable processor than can replace a render farm (I believe thats what there refered as).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
I'd say almost everyone is in agreement that the Cell processor is a very powerful design, but I don't believe the PS3 will be the best example of what it can really do.
Sifting through what I've read about the PS3, the Cell processor is bottlenecked by a few things including but not limited to memory bandwidth, and a fairly generic pc graphics solution from nvidia (by generic I mean, one of their standard pc products tweaked slightly for use on the PS3).
The "movie quality" games that I'm assuming the article is referring to are the demos shown at places such as e3, which are nothing more than either pre-rendered movies or carefully programmed, high end pc demos (Epic demo with high end pc and 7800 sli config).
I'm not trying to disparage the ps3, nvidia, or IBM. Frankly, I'm a fan of Nvidia and the Cell processor and I truly believe (drm jokes aside) the ps3 will be a solid console, but I think saying that the PS3 with Cell, "...is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics" is misleading, ignorant and sensationlist journalism.
$sys$droids
Movies take several years to generate two hours of content. Games are often ten times that long, with a much smaller budget. How can they possibly be of comparable visual quality? and why do people try?
I would much rather have games that concentrate on art instead of graphics. (Rez and Darwinia come to mind as examples of visually impressive games with non-realistic styles. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work well in terms of sales...)
With Apple no longer buying chips from them, they really need to prove themselves.
If you equate Power or IBM processors with Apple, then you have no clue. Check out a few datacenters and see just what's running inside some of those large black boxes with 3 blue letters on them. You keep your G4/G5, I'll stick to playing with Power4s, Power5s (and the projected Power6s when they get here).
*patpatpat*.. just lay your little head back down, don't you fret none... *patpatpat*
-'fester
-'fester
Could we all just remember what IBM had in mind when they designed Cell? If you have a read of the Introduction [Pdf warning], you can see they identified the primary bottlenecks to performance, back in 2000, one of the most important problems being memory latency. Now, if you've done some work with assembler, you should know that every time you touch main memory, you loose about 20-30 clock cycles through your memory's low speed. If you want an example, I have a 3GHz computer, but the memory goes at 400Mhz. Just think how much time it must spend waiting for that memory?
Cell counters this problem by using SIMD in combination with what they call "Local Storage". Instead of having to wait for every single memory transfer, threads can read blocks of memory into storage actually on the SPE, process it, and then read it back. All with a couple of instructions, and execution continues even while the memory is been read/written.
The closest that present-day multi-processor computers can get to that is by caching the data. However, that still means that a cache miss will halt execution for many cycles, and each processor / core has to constantly check what other processors / cores have in their caches, ocassionally invalidating them.
What this all adds up to, is a level of efficiency that hasn't been seen before. However, I don't think it's gonna be anyway near "movie quality" graphics, you'd need a farm of Cells for that.
PowerPC on mac was a small blip on IBM's radar. PowerPC is SMOKIN' in the embedded space. Apple leaned on IBM hard about increasing chip speed, pricing, irregular purchase numbers, etc. Losing apple was a relief, IBM can now get back to the **very** profitable business w/o Apple's 2 cents.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
MOD up as funny.
(The joke is that Holywood's quality is lacking.)
Um... no. If Valve (not Blizzard) go out of business, you won't be able to play your games online anymore. You'll theoretically still be able to play LAN games and single-player. But I share your concern.
However, as far as DRM goes, Steam seems pretty inoffensive to me. You can make & restore backups of the data, you can install the game on more than one computer (but you can only play multiplayer on one computer at a time). I don't think Valve could have made the DRM any weaker without having Half-Life 2 cracked and illegally distributed on a massive scale within minutes of release.
I think the case for DRM on games is a lot stronger than for DRM on movies. In the case of games, most are bought by teenagers who would have the time and motivation to go and hunt down a pirated/cracked copy with pretty much no remorse. I know very few of my peer-group at school would have gone out and bought a game if there was any way on earth to avoid paying. In the case of movies, the majority of sales are to adults, the majority of whom I believe will go for what's most convenient -- and heavily DRM'd movies aren't convenient in the slightest.
The big reason I like Steam is that it makes it possible for small studios to distribute their games worldwide without having to worry about fickle publishers, and Darwinia's release on Steam is a good example of why that's a good thing; before the Valve deal it had very few sales outside the UK, and since then many thousands of copies have been sold worldwide. And over 50% of the retail price goes to Introversion, rather than the typical ~20% that the studio receives in a normal publishing deal.
Pirate Party UK
Thanks, now I don't have to barter my soul to read somewhat clueless technical rubbish from a business & financial magazine ;)
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
The 68060 was announced as the end of the 68000 line before it ever entered production. Apple had the choice of abandoning the 68000s or be regarded as a dead-end company.
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