IBM's Cell Processor — Not Just for PS3 Anymore

TechFreep writes to tell us that IBM has released a new line of QS20 Blade Servers based on the processor they developed for the Playstation 3. From the article: "Today IBM announced a new line of high-powered QS20 Blade Servers intended for use in seismic research, encryption, digital image rendering and military surveillance applications. Each QS20 will include two nine-cored Cell Processors clocked at 3.2Ghz apiece, which were developed along with Sony and Toshiba for Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console. As Playstation 3 isn't scheduled for release until November, the QS20 will mark the first application in which the highly-touted Cell will be available to consumers."

Comments

Apple was a tiny bit of IBM's production

[SuperBanana]

IBM has oodles of fab capacity. Don't forget Apple has dropped off the queue.

Apple was one of IBM's smallest consumers of PowerPC chips, and always was. The embedded and entertainment market dominates their "queue", and is one of the main reasons the PowerPC series never pushed as hard clock-wise as Intel does; the embedded market sees higher clock speeds as greater power consumption/heat dissipation and more (electronic and thermal) design challenges. When Apple took a hike, IBM didn't shed any tears, and said as much.

I don't have any specific numbers, but I believe Apple's purchases were under 5% of total production. You may say "well, going with Intel was a REALLY stupid idea!" Wrong- before, Apple was "the little fish using embedded-market processors for consumer computers", and the goals didn't match. Now, they're using chips specifically targeted to the markets Apple wants to be in.

Re:Apple was a tiny bit of IBM's production

[Ilgaz]

3% of total PowerPC, yes that is FreeScale official number, if we add the IBM 970 (G5), it will be likely 5%. For people can't believe what they read: Yes, Apple only bought 5% of Power architecture CPUs, in their entire life. If you have a good quality car, you likely have 8-10 Power architecture CPUs.

You can't blame anyone for thinking Power architecture, a living legend or empire is dead after Apple moved away, Apple is run by Steve Jobs who is a publicity genius.

I am sure IBM or Freescale will think twice before doing any business with Apple in the future since Apple attacked PowerPC more than Intel etc. ever dared.

They now claim Xeon based Servers are 5x faster than G5 (yes,PPC970) and their fanboys cheering. Fanboys don't make million dollar server purchases though.

I just wonder what happened to second hand value of those $40.000+ Xserve G5 setups after Mr. Jobs and Apple called them 5x slower. Well, that is what you get for choosing a portable audio oriented company for your server setup instead of IBM or Sun. ;)

I think it is IBM and FreeScale dumped Apple not vice versa.

PS: I own Quad G5 and purchased months after Intel announcement. ;)

Lost in the noise is the dying Sun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lost in the noise is the fact that the multi-core Cells are IBM's answer to Sun's chip multiprocessor (CMP) -- i.e., Niagara and Rock. Nothing about the CMP is new or unique. Academia has already done 10+ years of research on these beasts, and industry has ready access to the academic results.

IBM already has a CMP. Both AMD and Intel will soon have CMPs. Here, CMP does not mean duo-core; CMP means at least 4 cores.

The window of opportunity for Sun has now closed.

What is ingenious about IBM is the fact that IBM is essentially using the R&D in its consumer-electronics division (that builds processors for game consoles and other toys) to advance R&D in the business-oriented high-performance-processor/high-end-server division. Building electronics for toys has actually strengthened non-toy products.

When will Mattel and Hasbro start selling their own supercomputers?

The plan all along...

[Invisible Now]

This has always been the plan and was a guiding principal in the Cell's design. Amortize the cost of a very usefull (To federal customers) chip over the estimated 40-60M playstations that will use a very similar (But not identical) design. From the beginning the chip was dual-purpose designed with very high speed interconnects and protocols for massive parallel-ism.

$29/chip x 64k chips = more ops per buck than ever - thanks to the world's gamers...

The problem for both PS3 and the NSA, etc is IBM's 10-20% yields. PS3 for Christmas? They better get up the curve fast...

BTW - Anyone remember back to when the Soviets used to buy up Ataris and canabilize their chips for sonobouys?

Re:Playstation 3

[poot_rootbeer]

if they're moving from 8-core 3.2 GHz targets to 9-core 3.2 GHz targets.

I think it's more likely a misstatement in the article than an actual change in what's being produced.

The Cells being produced for the PS3 have one primary processor (PPE) and eight secondary processors (SPE's)--only seven of which need to be functional at 2.8GHz for it to meet Sony's specs--for a total of 9 (or 8 for PS3) 'processors'. Not quite the same thing as 'cores' in the traditional sense of the word.

It's possible that these chips for these new servers are identical on silicon to the PS3 chips, only IBM will not pass them unless all 8 SPE's are functional at the full 3.2GHz clock rate.

Kind of like 386DX vs. 386SX -- instead of throwing away the DX chips that had defective math coprocessors, Intel simply burned out the traces, screened a different label on them, and sold them at discount prices.

Its not so highly touted

[crossmr]

Chris Hecker for example pretty much says they're crap for game consoles. http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/ burn_the_house_.html

So, as you know, graphics and physics grind on large homogenous floating point data structures in a very straight-line structured way. Then we have AI and gameplay code. Lots of exceptions, tunable parameters, indirections and often messy. We hate this code, it's a mess, but this is the code that makes the game DIFFERENT. Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation consoles: I'm about to break a ton of NDAs here, oh well, haha, I never signed them anyway.

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? It's cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right? Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? It's great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips - straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.