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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?
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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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
The prize is a cool $50,000, so Sun seems to be serious about this.
If Sun were really serious, they'd put a $500,000 team on it to develop something themselves. Paying for 1/3 - 1/2 a man-year of development is not that serious.
you hand optimize (and design) your program for the cell.
Every parallel architecture I've ever programmed for had nice APIs for offloading and directing tasks to the various available processing units. There shouldn't be much 'hand-optimization' involved in the sense you're implying.
Developers who write code that takes advantage of GPUs in modern gaming PCs are already familliar with this style programming, and the ones that understand the architecture instead of memorizing the APIs or program out of a cookbook should have no trouble adapting.
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.
"My system also has no storage inside the blades. Just give me 4 network interfaces per "blade", with at least 2 optionally capable of providing ISCSI TOE/HBA or 2/4 gigabit FC. No SATA/SCSI bus hardware to pay for, cool, power or otherwise. No CD/DVD/Floppy nonsense either. If I briefly need removable storage I'll use USB, thank you very much."
The IBM blades allow you to do this. They have up to two internal drives, but one can be replaced with a daughter card that provides either two more ethernet ports or a card for two FC ports. Their DVD and Floppy drives are USB devices which can be switched to connect to any of the 14 blades in the chassis.
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
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.
Hate to break some painful news to you, but "24-bit" RBG refers to each color getting 8bits -- an UNSIGNED INTEGER value.
No floating point involved -- at all...
Now for 3D Graphics, coordinates may be represented in floating point. But during rendering, the values are converted to 8-bit integer values for Red, Green, and Blue components of each pixel.
And financial calculations are computed using INTEGER arithemetic....
A lot of things that might appear to require floating point, can often be implemented using "fixed-point" integer arithmetic (VERY accurately). They advantage of the latter is reduced hardware cost, increased speed, and lower power consumption.
Do you think a celluar phone performs the voice compression in floating point? Nope!