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Octopiler to Ease Use of Cell Processor

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ps3-where-are-you dept.

Sean0michael writes "Ars Technica is running a piece about The Octopiler from IBM. The Octopiler is supposed to be compiler designed to handle the Cell processor (the one inside Sony's PS3). From the article: 'Cell's greatest strength is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. And Cell's greatest weakness is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. So Cell has immense performance potential, but if you want to make it programable by mere mortals then you need a compiler that can ingest code written in a high-level language and produce optimized binaries that fit not just a programming model or a microarchitecture, but an entire multiprocessor system.' The article also has several links to some technical information released by IBM."

10 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. Makes you wonder by Egregius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It makes you wonder what the release-titles of the PS3 will be like, if they didn't have a decent compiler untill now. And 'the PS3 is due out in 2006.'

  2. Hello, Itanium... by general_re · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sound familiar? "All we need to make it work as advertised is a really slick compiler that doesn't actually exist yet..."

    --
    ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
    1. Re:Hello, Itanium... by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Everybody prefers a simpler programming model, there's no doubt about that. But with the recent lack of progress in unicore speeds, something has to give, and apparently that "something" is programming complexity. While the PC world moves from 1 to 2 cores, the PS3 is jumping straight to 8. But going from 1 to 2 threads is a bigger conceptual jump than from 2 to 8 anyways.

      Fortunately for IBM and Sony, games are one place where hand-optimizing certain algorithms is still practical. I doubt they will place all their eggs in the octopiler basket. I can't imagine a compiler will find that much paralellism in code that isn't explicitly written to be parallel. Personally, I think they should instead focus on explicitly parallel libraries for common game algorithms like collision detection.

  3. Sadly, not a lotta FPU hardware. by mosel-saar-ruwer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'Cell's greatest strength is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. And Cell's greatest weakness is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip.

    Sadly, there's almost no FPU hardware to speak of: 32-bit single precision floats in hardware; 64-bit double precision floats are [somehow?] implemented in software and bring the chip to its knees.

    Why can't someone invent a chip for math geeks? With 128-bit hardware doubles? Are we really that tiny a proportion of the world's population?

    1. Re:Sadly, not a lotta FPU hardware. by stedo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The basic purpose of the Cell is to make the PS3 work. The basic purpose of the PS3 is to play games. Games, as a rule, don't give a damn about 64-bit floating point. Games can get away with 32-bit because they don't need to be incredibly accurate, they just need to be fast. No gamer will care whether or not the trajectory of the bullet was out by 0.000000000023~ as long as it moves fluidly. So, in making a chip for gaming, you are far better off making 32-bit really fast than spending time and die space on perfecting useless 64-bit.

  4. Anyone having flashbacks? by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I seem to remember that the PS2 was a bitch to code for as well and that many of the early titles did not make full use of its capabilities. So?

    All this meant that as the PS2 aged it could 'keep up' because the coders kept getting better and better.

    Mere mortals do not write the latest graphics engines. I think there are a lot more tier1 people running around then /. seems to think. They are just to busy to comment here.

    All that really matters is wether the launch titles will be 'good' enough. Then the full power of the system can be unleashed over its lifespan.

    If your a game company and your faced with the choice of either making just another engine OR spending some money on the kind of people that code for super computers and get an engine that will blow the competition out of the water then it will be a simple choice.

    Just because some guy on website finds it hard doesn't mean nobody can do it.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  5. compilers ... by dioscaido · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... can get you only so far. You need to have parallelism in mind when you write the high-level code, otherwise it may end up with needless dependence on serial execution that a compiler may not be able to break, reducing the benefits of such an architecture. It will be interesting to see how well games are suited for concurrent execution. Logically there are lots of computations that can be performed independently (AI, physics) but all of it has inherent interaction with a central data source (the game world).

  6. Re:Far too complex? by stedo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your average C programmer will not be developing the core code. Most likely, a group of very good coders will create a game engine, and the average C programmers can use the API that the highly-skilled, highly-paid engine coders created to hide unnecessary implementation details.

  7. Re:A summary of the idea here... by irexe · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Hypothesis: A compiler can be developed that takes serially written programs and auto-transforms them into parallel programs to exploit the benefits of parallelism.

    Parallel programming and automated parallelization have already been researched exhaustively throughout the last thirty years of the 20th century. The outcome of all this research is that it is not feasible/tractable to create a compiler that is capable of recongising parallelism, as you suggest. Compilers that can do this are sometimes called 'heroic' compilers, for the reason that the required transformations are so incredibly difficult, and heroic compilers that actually work (well) simply don't exist.

  8. Re:special compilers, expert programmer = DOA prod by theJML · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As a programmer, there's only so much that can be done in software. Sure you can parallize things, and you can come up with newer/faster algorthms, but if we didn't get dual proc systems, that would have been pointless. So with parallel procs, we get better parallel code. Hardware advances will create software advances, and new algorthms will direct hardware futures. This is the way the world works, and I think it's worked out fairly well so far. Lets see what the Cell and processors after it can do!

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    -=JML=-