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The Potential of Science With the Cell Processor
prostoalex writes "High Performance Computing Newswire is running an article on a paper by computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They have evaluated the processor's performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The full paper is available from Computer Science department at Berkeley."
"The paper did a lot of hand-optimization, which is irrelevent to most programmers. "
But not to programmers who do science.
"What gcc -O3 does is way more importent then what an assembly wizard can do for most projects."
Not an unsurmountable problem.
Hand optimization _is_ relevant to scientific programmers
Hand optimizing code is what I do as a game developer and I can assure you that it is very relevant to my job.
IF IBM was the maker of the chip they would most certainly not sell them at a loss. Why should they? Sony might sell the console at a loss to recoup the loss from game sales but IBM has no way to recoup any losses.
Then again IBM is in a parnetship with Sony and Toshiba so the chip is probaly owned by this partnership and Sony will just be making the chips it needs itself.
So any idea that IBM is selling Cells at a loss is insane.
Then the cost of the PS3 is mostly claimed to be in the Blu-ray drive tech. Not going to be off much intrest to a science setup is it? Even if they want to use a blu-ray drive they need just 1 in a 1000 cell rig. Not going to break the bank.
No the cell will be cheap because when you run an order of millions of identical cpu's prices drop rapidly. There might even be a very real market for cheap cells. Regular CPU's always have lesser quality versions. Not a problem for an intel or AMD who just badge them celeron or whatever but you can't do that with a console processor. All cell processors destined for the PS3 must be off similar spec.
So what to do with a cell chip that has one of the cores defective? Throw it away OR rebadge it and sell it for blade servers? That is were celerons come from (defective cache)
We already know that the cell processor is going to be sold for other purposes then the PS3. IBM has a line of blade servers coming up that will use the cell.
No I am afraid that it will be perfectly possible to buy Cells and they will be sold at a profit just like any other cpu. Nothing special about it. they will however benefit greatly from the fact that they already got a large customer lined up. Regular CPU's need to recover their costs as quickly as possible because their success will be uncertain. This is why regular top end cpu's are so fucking expensive. But the Cell allready has an order for millions, meaning the costs can be spread out in advance over all those units.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What seems to be more important than that is:
"According to the authors, the current implementation of Cell is most often noted for its extremely high performance single-precision (32-bit) floating performance, but the majority of scientific applications require double precision (64-bit). Although Cell's peak double precision performance is still impressive relative to its commodity peers (eight SPEs at 3.2GHz = 14.6 Gflop/s), the group quantified how modest hardware changes, which they named Cell+, could improve double precision performance."
So the Cell is great because there's going to be millions of them sold in PS3's so they'll be cheap. But it's only really great if a new custom variant is built. Sounds kind of contradictory.
E pluribus unum
By the end of the article, I was looking for their idea of a hypothetical best-case pony.