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IBM to use Cell in Blade Servers
taskforce writes "IBM announced on Wednesday that it would be putting versions of its Cell processor inside its increasingly popular low-power blade servers by this summer. From the article: 'For Cell to gain wide acceptance, IBM needs to spur outside programmers to write software that takes advantage of Cell's prowess. That could prove more challenging than usual because Cell's architecture is so different.
IBM hopes this summer's release of the Cell-based servers kick-starts work by third-party programmers.'" Also covered in a PCPro article.
That could prove more challenging than usual because Cell's architecture is so different. IBM hopes this summer's release of the Cell-based servers kick-starts work by third-party programmers.'"
Deja vu?
Take a peek at http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/patents_and_publi cations.html to see the patents and whitepapers for cell technology. One interesting point is the Online Game Prototype white paper on there.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Sun Microsystems has decided to include the Gohan chip to combat IBM's Cell chips.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
It being command-line compatible with (or simply a back-end of) an existing compiler like gcc is even better.
Add a port of a good OS, and your platform is suddenly incredibly attractive to developers.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Considering they've already got Linux on Cell and a proposed model for making userland apps to take advantage of the SPUs, and have had these since last summer, I wouldn't be surprised if some open source code is already in the process of being ported.
Anyone know of any specific server apps?
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Juhi Jotwani, IBM's director of Blade Center and xSeries solutions, holds the company's new Cell processor during a presentation yesterday in New York.
She said, "Come on, juh know jouwant it!"
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
As I understand it, the various pipelines of the Cell chip tend to be more specialized than the Coolthreads technology Sun is using on their new T1 processor. However, even with 32 full-blown pipelines, Sun is also concerned about whether their chips will be put to good use or not.
I'm not quite sure what IBM is planning to do, but Sun has started a contest to see who can build the coolest program that takes advantage of their new Coolthreads technology. The prize is a cool $50,000, so Sun seems to be serious about this. The results of the contest may very well prove whether the new parallel technologies have a future or not.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Blades in Cells are usually a Bad Thing. Apparently Cells in Blades are a good thing! Go figure...
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It's a hell of a paradigm shift for programmers to go from writing code that targets one CPU to code that deliberately splinters tasks across a bank of specialized processors.
It's fun to bash the Cell as a general purpose CPU when no one has actually suggested it's designed for that.
All of the above being true, it remains to be seen what gains IBM's POWER/Cell system actually offers above present architectures -- RISC was the next big thing, too, until Intel internalized part of it into the x86 architecture.
Flyover landscape graphics demos are a shopworn rabbit pulled out of a threadbare hat: convert fractals into craggy vertical displacements with extremely primitive lighting/mapping. Show me an architecture that can *realtime* render Incredibles-caliber cloth/hair simulations and I'll get a hard-on while ATI and nVidia executives slit their wrists.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Would it be possible to write some kind of virtualization that would present an easy-to-develop-on layer? Besides, if you already have Linux that runs on this platform and compilers written, how would it be any harder than developing for any other platform? A rose by any other name...
ConsultingFair.com
Nope, Cell isn't increasingly popular, but the summary referred to them being put "inside its increasingly popular low-power blade servers."
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This probably means that the PS3 will either actually make its "spring" release or that it is hampered by problems with the Blu-Ray drives/disks instead of a Cell shortage because otherwise I couldn't imagine that Sony would allow IBM to use even one Cell for something that's not a PS3 for the first 3 months.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Marketing people are quick to describe the 0 to >0 transition as "increasingly popular". Of course the rest of the world considers it statistical noise. : )
So this means I'll be able to take my PS3 and slide it into my IBM Blade chassis when I need more CPU. When I'm done, I pull it out and play.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
We've had blades with Cell cpus on them for quite a while. They're a lot different than any other architecture... resembling the pSeries layout more-so than others. One thing I don't like about the prototypes is that the Cell cpu's along with the bga memory they use are fused directly to the logic board. They're were a few pictures released to the public about a year ago on the Register but I can not find them now. Other than that they are seriously fast and very clusterable.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
IBM has opened the spec for their blade chassis design. Does anybody know if somebody is trying to make a 'desktop' blade chassis? Rather then buying a huge box that holds 14 blades, something that might only hold two.
This doesn't mean make a desktop out of a blade, because as I understand it, so far the JS20s (IBMs PPC 970 blade) don't even have video cards. You have to set them up over the serial port, and run them over the network.
But does anybody have a development sized unit you don't need a server rack and new power circuits for?
Got a little hasty there. Whoops.
Thanks.
Itanium may perform better for some number crunching apps, but not enough to outweigh the costs, generally.
The cell processor, on the other hand offers such a giant increase in performance (for some applications) that you will see people investing time and money to take advantage of it. In addition, with Toshiba, Sony and IBM all with product plans and thus the related volume and eco-system surrounding development tools, etc., I think the cell is positioned far better than Itanium to succeed.
No problem, I actually read it like you read it when I re-read my the summary before I submitted it and I was like: "Wow did I really say that?"
This does raise a point about the importance of maintaining a presence in the PC market since that's where most of the programmers are. Especially for applications that exploit specific hardware features. I have a open source project with some portable api's which have completely different algorithms for the implementations on sparc, x86, and ppc. In the future, it's only going to be x86 specific implementations which will *not* be portable to other architectures most likely.
Then all that is needed is a honking big web connection, and something that can be legally downloaded for a while. Seed a couple of thousand torrents, and let the world at it.
Wow. Program for a while, then take a break playing the latest PS3 game -- all without leaving the confines of your own terminal into the system.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sun's new processor is designed for many-connection business server applications. Web stuff.
The Cell is designed for image processing and other high-volume number crunching.
The design decisions both companies made were heavily influenced by their target markets for these specific processors, and those target markets are very different.
These are apples and oranges.
They can't use that name, freescale (motorola) already has it, and killed the line. jsp?nodeId=0162468rH3YTLCvL2v
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/taxonomy
if you knew this, then fwoosh went the joke over my head
In my opinion, this thing will run well games, but that's about it. I've seen so far 2 presentations by IBM about the Cell processor (at (micro-)architecture conferences). Both times, the question on everybody's mind was "How do you program these things?". The answer was pretty much a hand-wavy "oh hmmm, well, blah blah blah manual"
The Raven
Won't the Cell reception be poor inside the metal cabinets?
*looks bright*
Seriously, first "funny" that's made me laugh in a while. Kudos.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
To the programmer, communicating with the SPU is abstracted to file i/o operations. Go check out IBM developerworks pages for lots of info.
Since the Cell is now integrated into the military apparatus of the best-funded military aparatus in the world, the Cell will live essentially forever. For the same reason, Ada (i.e. the computer language) will live forever even though few people in industry use the language.
By the way, Cell is also IBM's answer to Sun's Niagara. For years, Sun touted Niagara as a new revolution in computing: Niagara is supposedly the first commercially viable processor to use hordes of cores to quickly executed multithreaded applications.
Yet, Cell also uses hordes of cores. Though the Cell is 1 complex general-purpose POWER core plus 8 simple supporting specialized cores, IBM could easily downgrade the 1 complex core to a simple core (thus yielding additional silicon area) and upgrade the 8 simple specialized cores to 8 simple general-purpose cores. The hard part is linking the 9 cores together, but IBM already solved that problem when it created the Cell. (Intel is also working on a processor with hordes of cores.) If Niagara-based servers ever become popular, IBM is already prepared to launch a general-purpose Cell-based server.
The difference between the Cell and the Niagara is that the American military uses Cell, not Niagara. The American military will subsidize research on Cell.
This means exactly jack squat to me until I can buy one. Where, when, and how much. And no, I didn't RTFA.
In the DragonBall Z cartoon Gohan is the one who killed Cell.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I am curious what will come from this in the OSS world. IBM seems to be pretty willing and able to play nice with the OSS world. IBM works with alot of *nix things and needs developers to build for this processor... I think throwing this thing, some good tools, and some documentation into the OSS crowd of geeks could definetly help jumpstart this thing. It would also be really interesting to see what kind of things come out of this. If this thing really turns out to be hot for high end graphical stuff it could definetly lead the way in new innovative desktop enviroments in the nix enviroment. Efficient 3D interfaces maybe?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
All statistic are noise until you look for a pattern.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The compiler is exactly where the solution should be. Using DSPs as an example, it is virtually impossible to optimize DSP code by hand. The compiler will almost always do a better job. Same thing for Cell. If you put the onus on the programmers, this chip won't get widespread acceptance. If IBM wants people to use this chip then they better get busy writing some decent tools.
yeah, I know that much, I just don't know if he was actively making fun of the dragonball processor
Why go with SPEs anyhow? The whole problem with coding for the Cell involves the differences between the PPE and the SPE. The SPE doesn't have branch predictors, making it virtually useless for any sort of flow control.
Why didn't IBM just pack in a lesser number of PPEs? The PPE already seems to be a very lightweight general purpose processing core, unless I'm missing something. It is about the same size as an SPE. So why not just put 9 PPEs on a Cell chip instead of 1 PPE and 8 SPEs?
If you had 9 PPEs on the chip, any multithreaded code (servers for example) would see massive benefits without having to rewrite it to try to find aspects of the program that could run on what is effectively a DSP. While everybody else was fooling around with 2-core processors, they'd have a 9-core processor on the market. Sure, slower per-core, but 9 of them, with that number going up in the future.
Or am I missing something here?
Share and enjoy http://news.google.com/news?q=cell+yield+learning
He was probably just trying to capitolize on my very clever and original joke using Dragonball characters. Too bad funny doesn't count for karma so the joke is on him.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
> and killed the line
But, with dragonballs, you can ressurect things, right?
Start Running Better Polls
PPEs are bigger. Also, a dedicated slave processor doesn't have to worry about interrupts and context switches and OS crap, it can spend all its cycles on number crunching. Cell SPEs are all about moving large amounts of data and doing a whole lot of compute on that data. They're simpler and more efficient at what they're designed for.
Start Running Better Polls
This chip won't be popular until you can package it into a small box, sell it for less than the cost to build it, with high end audio/video built in, and someone develops games for it.
Nobody would be crazy enough to do that!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Actually, the bigger difference is in how the architecture changed. Cell processor is more along the lines of multi-core DSPs.
Standard computer graphics are RGB color at 24-bits per pixel [2^24 = 16777216], i.e. about 16 million colors.
Standard thinking in the graphics bidness is that: If our triangles will only be displayed in 24-bits worth of color, then why do we need to perform triangle-arithmetic in anything higher than maybe 32-bits worth of floating points?
Hence floating point calculations are 24-bit in the ATi world, and 32-bit in the nVidia and Playstation3/Cell world.
Boy, I hope they're upping that floating point number for these "server" chipsets, cause 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for even something as trivial as computing interest on a bank statement.
On the other hand, a "Cell" server CPU with a 128-bit FPU would be something to drool over. The problem, though, is that transistor counts on FPU's tend to increase as n^2, so each time you double the FPU bit-count [to 64-bits, then to 128-bits], your transistor count goes through the roof.
IBM needs to release two SIMPLE tutorials if they want programmers to bother porting code specifically to the cell:
1. A cell program that solves linear equations Ax=b efficently using SPE's. This would help those with data intensive problems.
2. A cell program that speeds up depth first search (a la for SAT,GRAPH COLORING, MAX-CLIQUE) by using the SPE's. This would help those programming CPU intensive problems.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Maybe a Media Server that uses a Cell, would work better? Not as much demands placed on it as a game console, and cheaper. Kind of like what happened to the Linksys.
They could come up with ATX or miniATX boards at real cheap prices, able to take your average DDR DIMMs, power supplies and IDE etc. Give it maybe 3 PCI slots... or 1 if its miniATX.
Sold for under $100, and theyre making money off it while spreading the love that will increase the developer market for the cell architecture.
It goes like this. Make a new architecture. Release a good compiler for free.. with awesome documentation and sample programs and libraries. Allow people to buy evaluation boards for low prices. Once you get people hooked enough, sell the chips themselves at high prices. Its the Microchip (tm) model. Their chips dont really do much for the high costs (compared to atmel, TI etc) but since everyone knows how to work them, they sell sell sell. Rabbit semiconductors however are trying hard to get into the market, and their dev tools are cheap. It'll take time.
IBM cant release a couple o PDFs and one tough software suite and expect the world to jump on it. Theres a reason why theres so much momentum behind the Power architecture, and the Cell is different.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Blades, cells, it's getting to be like prison around here.
If you put the onus on the programmers, this chip won't get widespread acceptance.
If you can write a PC program that uses 10 threads, then you can write a program that uses the Cell processor's PPC and 7 DSPs. Trouble is that most computer science education in universities doesn't cover practical use of threads.
8 general purpose core each capable of executing 4 threads beats cell hands down. I'd take a Niagra server over one of these anyday.
There were a couple that would be really helpful:
1. An implementation of zlib for the SPE architecture, with a speed comparison to the PPE. (Hopefully, the SPE is very fast...)
2. Examples of direct SPE-to-SPE streaming.
... suddenly it'll have millions of applications which can run on it.
Niagra is focused Integer, corporate workloads. Cell is designed for FP, scientific. There won't be much crosssover.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Linux:
Yellow Dog Linux runs on Cell. (Link; this is the same military product that is linked to in a Register article further up in the thread.) It's being marketed for semi-embedded uses, like in medical imaging systems, sonar and radar, etc., apparently.
Free Optimizing Compiler:
I have no idea whether there are any compiler optimizations for it in GCC, I suspect not, though. However there is a version of the IBM XL C compiler for it, available here (no idea if registration is required, I didn't attempt to download). I wonder how the IBM compiler is implemented, and whether you could use it in a Linux-based Cell system as a drop-in replacement for GCC. It says "GNU C extensions are welcome."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
if ibm wants to give the cell wide acceptance. they should give free access to programmers. not just sell the blades. thats expesive. ..
so
1) donate to sf.net serverfarm
2) have their own test drive program
3) donate servers to universities
4) donate a server to me
5) support linux on cell
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
That has to be one of the most ill informed comments that I have seen on this site in the past 6 months.
The bulk of the post is approximately three sentences; there's a further addendum which asserts that transistor counts on FPUs do not double as the bit count on the floats doubles [rather, the transistor count increases at a much larger rate].
If anything asserted here is factually false, then please take the time to correct it:
Again, if any of this is false, please correct it.