Slashdot Mirror
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."
With Apple no longer buying chips from them, they really need to prove themselves.
I lost my signature... help!
**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.
So, does this mean the PS3 will have more games based on movies?
Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell
Damn, the enemy within. I can't believe they've infiltrated IBM. Is nowhere safe?
>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
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
More information about the Cell processor directly from the source : The Cell project at IBM Research
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
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
I think I've heard of this line couple year back, sometime before or around PS2's lunch date possiblly.
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...)
I guess we will be seeing Cell in servers at some point as well, though not as cheap as in a PS3.
Sony probably won't want anyone to run Linux on the PS3, lest geeks start cranking out PS3 server farms, but hopefully Sony will leave enough backdoors so can we can see the PS3 run Linux (or FreeBSD, or some beta OpenSolaris distro). Knoppix running on the PS3 just about removes the need for a home computer.
Hopefully Sony will create such a backdoor. I mean if they can screw up with a rootkit...
*ducks*
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Motion pictures made in the 1930s are also, technically, "movie quality", seeing as they're, well, movies....
What exactly does the reporter (and Sony) mean by that statement?
(Oh, yeah, I forgot: "well if they'll be the same quality as some of the movies Hollywood pumps out recently, I'm not buying it...")
If you want to read more about the CELL heres a link for you...
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/home.html
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 :-)
The IEEE Spectrum magazine (surely a better source for Slashdot readers) predicts that Cell will be a winner in the multimedia space, noting that already its going into TVs made by Toshiba.
They also mention Linux on page 2.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
mistake?
a mistake is forgetting to tighten a bolt, or carry the two, resulting in problems down the line.
sony's rootkit was an intenional and corporate level decision. DRM itself has no justification for existence at all. When confronted with the fact that it does not stop piracy, executives often come clean by putting forth a "positively spun" statement which pans out to, and i paraphrase: "we want to deny the technologically unsavvy of flexibility theyre used to in order to screw them out of money we dont really deserve"
Sony's products arent that great either. most sony stuff i've owned has broken (not broken down.. literally broken like plates break), so i have no trouble with the idea of not buying their flimsy and anticonsumer products.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
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.
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
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Well, the support and tools for the Xbox have always been top notch. The PS2 was abysmal, but since it was selling well everyone went through the pain. I remember the first PS2 dev kit we got, half the documentation was in Japanese still. The support from Sony was horrible. This time around the support for the 360 is about the same as the Xbox and Sony seems a bit better, but the PS3 is a beast an info is only trickling out on how to get things done on it.