IEEE Spectrum On The PS3 Learning Curve

An anonymous reader writes "The Insomniacs is the cover article in the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, discussing developers ramping up to the PS3 hardware. The article features Insomniac Games, who developed the PS3 launch title Resistance: Fall of Man. Despite mixed reports in the press, the Insomniac folks are delighted to be working with Sony's technology, and describe the process of helping to make or break a console launch." From the article: "Despite the delays, there's something inside the PS3 that burnished Sony's reputation as a hardware company. The heart of the machine is the powerful new Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor. Developed over the last five years by Sony, IBM, and Toshiba on a reported budget of $400 million, the Cell is not just another chip: it is a giant leap beyond the current generation of computer processors into a nextgen muscle machine optimized for multimedia tasks."

Comments

Re:Oh man....

[xero314]

don't ask me why they're selling Cell-based blade servers

They are selling Cell based servers, blade or otherwise, because the cell processor was designed with Scientific Computing in mind. For those that don't know this is the category of computing that is done on all Super Computers at this time. IBM is hoping to replace the current generation of x86/Power based super computers, and super clusters, with Cell based clusters. The current top rank Supercomputer is capable of 367 teraflops peak using 131072 IBM PowerPC CPUs. This configuration could, in theory, be replaced with 896 cell processors. This is a massive savings in power consumption, physical space and cooling requirements. This could also be used to scale up to even faster Supercomputers using thousands of cell processors, which where built for distributed computing as well as the scientific aspect.