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.

Comments

Where have I heard this before?

[Jordan Catalano]

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?

How about a free optimizing compiler

[mi]

a free optimizing compiler, that takes advantage of the architecture, would do wonders...

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.

Re:How about a free optimizing compiler

[ajs]

And of course, optimizing in that way is probably analogous to the halting problem, but that doesn't mean that a good general-purpose back-end for GCC could not be written. History teaches us one thing about specialized hardware that we should never forget: the average user of your hardware is going to need to have VERY LITTLE of their code hand-tuned for it. For example, let's say that this hardware tends to be very good at encryption. Your average user would likely be running a Web server or some other sort of networking technology, and almost NONE of that code cares about the 10-100 hand-tuned routines in OpenSSL that you wrote for this platform.

Get a good compiler and general-purpose OS up and running fast (which, by the way, I'm sure IBM is doing), and you'll see many more people writing special-purpose code where they need it.

Linux on Cell

[morgan_greywolf]

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?

PS3 release date?

[nutshell42]

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.

Give me an ATX board

[mnmn]

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.