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IBM Adds Videogame Console Chips to Mainframes
GoIBMPS3 writes "Soon the powerful 'Cell' microprocessor that fuels Sony's PlayStation 3 console will be available in IBM mainframe computers. The intent is to allow high-performance machines to run complex online games and virtual worlds. 'The integration initially will be accomplished by networking the mainframe with IBM's Cell blades, but eventually the Cells will be plugged more directly into the mainframes via PCI adapter cards, IBM said. It's the latest twist in IBM's years-long effort to keep mainframes not only relevant but also cutting-edge. IBM is touting the partnership as an example of hybrid computing--a trend sweeping the high-performance computing industry as companies augment general-purpose servers with special-purpose chips that to accelerate particular tasks.'"
IBM scrapped a wii-mote enabled server consoles for the management of online worlds.
However the prototype was destroyed in a freak bowling/mountain dew/pizza accident.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Some venerable BOFH episodes come to mind (though there it was VAX, not a mainframe).
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It's about time that video game programmers have a career path when they face mandatory retirement at the age of 30. After all, Space War was created on a mainframe.
They're going to plug in Cell CPUs into the mainframe via just plain PCI? Don't they mean PCI-X or PCI-E? I'd think using a Hypertransport bus would be perfect for co-processors, too.
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Someday, in the future, a computer the size of a small room will be possible!
And it will be as powerful as today's most advanced videogames...
Let's face it, nobody buys a mainframe unless they've already got a very specific use planned for it. It's not like an x86 server where it's cheap enough that you might think "We'll use it for X, but even if we don't, we'll use it for Y".
And the Cell isn't really intended for general-purpose use - it's far more appropriate to use it in a system where the code has been written and designed specifically for it.
What better market than one which is composed almost entirely of people with reasonably specific, defined needs?
You can create new servers on the fly,
Really high performance
Easily scalable,
and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.
To try and replicate those efforts on PC servers is a waste of money.
Properly done, those issues that arise in many MMORPGs when a large percentage of their population goes to on area for an event....Blizzard I'm looking at you.
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I have a JCL script for a character I've been working on for months. He has five hundred hit points, six spells, a sword, a long sword, a battle axe, a print spool, and a suite of DB2 utilities.
Pay for shipping and I'll send you the punch cards.
Perhaps the Cell will result in a more optimized Game Grid so the MCP can better manage programs by putting them through multi-core Light Cycle matches.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
IT productivity took a plunge today on this announcement as millions of IT professionals stopped work dead in their tracks and began day-dreaming of the "after-hours" activities that they could get involved in.
More news at 11.
IBM Adds Videogame Console Chips to Mainframes
The Cell is no more a console chip than the x86 (used in XBox) or the PowerPC (used in the 360). Yes, it is used in a console, but I hate to see such a powerful chip "type-cast" to the console. I'm glad IBM is cutting the Cell loose by actually using it for something other than console gaming. However, I wish they would have used a better example than "Virtual Worlds" for its uses. Something like Medical Imaging, 3D Rendering or even Weather Forecasting would have been so much better towards breaking the Cell from its gaming niche.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
IBM isn't the first or last to come up with the idea behind the CELL processor. With the advent of programmable shaders, the GPU industry was headed that way like a freight train. When people started using these highly pipelined, highly parallel SIMD stream processors that we know as GPUs to do supercomputing, people with a clue took notice and decided that it would be sensible to strip out the video components and generalize the compute engine. However, this kind of compute engine only works well for stream processing, requiring some kind of general-purpose CPU to supervise. And this is exactly what the CELL processor is: A PowerPC supervising the operation of an array of stream processors.
So, while the CELL is inspired by GPU design, I think it would be more appropriate to say that CELL is a supercomputing architecture that, being what it is, is also highly suitable for graphics applications. As such, I think what the slashdot article says is silly. What IBM is doing is putting a supercomputing architecture into a mainframe. This isn't weird. It's sensible and a wise move, technically and competitively.
I always wanted to use a pickup truck to bring my rig to a LAN party.
(Actually, that's all bullshit. Don't play games, never been to a LAN party, don't know where to find one. But that's never stopped posting here before.)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
That was my first thought too. Then I actually bothered to read the fricken' synopsis and realized that this was IBM's actual spin on it, and they were touting the cell-on-mainframe thing as a server for virtual worlds. It's still kind of a dumb spin, obviously geared for non technical types who may be decision makers on large MMORPG projects. IBM's thinking is probably that they will associate the cell processor with games and therefore feel it would be a good thing to use in running an MMORPG. Which it probably will be, as an MMORPG server is inherently a massively parallel application.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The Cell has never been intended solely to be a "game chip." It was always intended to be useful in large supercomputer type environments.
The Folding At Home client is an example of a large clustered-based application that uses the Cell as a math processor, as is the recent "real-time raytracing" demo. Both are applications of the Cell in a "mainframe" type environment.
So it's not surprising that IBM would be releasing Cell-based machines - that's been the plan all along. It was never intended just to be used in the PS3.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
...IBM might be trying to put a "serious" spin on this, but let's be honest, we all know that it's aimed at Los Alamos scientists who want to play Motorstorm and Resistance: Fall of Man during their tea break.
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Someone should really make sure that IBM gets the "your product failed" memo every once in a while. Unless they're planning to sell these things to projects like SETI they don't seem to have much use.
So now that IBM plans to use the same cell processors found in the ps3 what effect will it have on manufacturing costs or even supply issues? Anyone? It sounds like good news for Sony at least PR wise. ANd if it drives costs down, even better news for them.
Gaming for over 25 years
What I want: a hobbyist card with a Cell chip to do hobbyist things on. There is a company that makes a dual-cell card ... for $8000, 'coming soon'. Anyone know of a cheaper way to get into Cell, besides Playstation?
I would think there would be a healthy market for a 'cell accelerator card', especially in the world I come from (Modeling and Simulation)...
IBM has been talking this up for a while. The idea is to offload some "streaming stuff" onto the Cell processors. The phrase "XML acceleration" has been used, which probably means the Cell gets the job of taking some DB2 result and pumping it out in XML. It's also useful for SSL encryption and other related streaming-type tasks.
This is a traditional IBM transaction processing approach. The mainframe is surrounded by lesser machines which handle the communications and formatting, extract the transaction which needs access to the data, ships that to the mainframe, gets a result back, and then formats a reply to the requestor. In the green-screen terminal era, that was done by dedicated hardware. In the web era, too much of that work moved onto the mainframe itself.
Think of this usage of the Cell as offloading the front half of Apache to peripheral processors. When your AJAX app makes an XMLHttpRequest, the idea is that the front-end machines get the request, decode it, wait until it's complete, then pass one single transaction to the mainframe. A single reply comes back, is reformatted as XML, and is shipped out to the client. The number of events processed by the mainframe goes way down, and all the protocol work is offloaded to the low-cost Cell machines with tiny memories.
Has nothing to do with gaming, though. They're not putting the PS3's GPU (from NVidia) on mainframes.
Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though. That's too small. Just cramming the whole protocol stack in there will fill most of the memory. I think this thing will really start to fly when IBM gets up to a 2-4MB per Cell CPU. Then you'll be able to fit the front-end processing for a web server in the Cell. Until then, it's a niche product.
A machine that *might* be able to handle Aero.
So when will they start adding BluRay and dual HDMI? :)
I guess someone has to buy up all of those leftover PS3s.
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What it *could* mean is IBM are beginning to think that, after seeing the sales figures, using these in just the PS3 won't be the cash cow they had hoped for and are trying to boost sales of the cell processor in any way possible.
[The Universe] has gone offline.
trend sweeping the high-performance computing industry as companies augment general-purpose servers with special-purpose chips to accelerate particular tasks.
As I recall my 286 had a Math Coprocessor.
Years later I bought a hardware MPEG decoder card so that I could watch DVD's without skipping on my old Pentium ii.
And over the last several years I've installed GPU boards to accelerate some particular video rendering tasks.
Its nice to see the idea of special purpose chips for hardware acceleration is finally catching on in high performance computing.
The title is misleading. The Cell processor is not a "console" chip, it is a microprocessor. Period. So what if Sony decided to use the Cell processor in the PS3? They could have selected from any number of processors: AMD64, x86, PPC, Motorola 6800.. whatever!
The Cell processor is and always has been designed for shipping out complex calculations to sub-processing units (I believe their latest term is Synergistic Processing Units [SPUs]?), it was not designed for purpose of Sony bragging about it.
Aikon-
Why are you saying that? I have found nothing of the sort on any news or sports sites........
How about, "Cell Processor Used Outside PS3"?
Am I the only one who remembers the talk about how the Cell was going to create a paradigm shift in general computing, and we'd be seeing them in all sorts of devices? Now they put it in an industry product and its news...
Nice post.
I'd be very curious to see when they create some Folding-at-Home (FAH) clients. The PS3 clients are kicking butt, and I'll bet that hasn't escaped the attention of IBM. Distributed computing is an unappreciated upcoming technology.
In fact, I have to wonder if IBM's work on the WCG isn't part if its effort to develop this sort of technology and to create some high visibility track record.
Best regards.
Faster than the PCI bus? Seems like they need another way to plug it into the mainframe.
mainframes are no longer necessary.
the only reason people still use the AS/400 or any other IBM mainframe is because it was too expensive to justify scrapping for something modern.
the AS/400 or iSeries as it's been renamed, could be replaced in a heartbeat by a LAMP server with an AJAX frontend for 1% of the cost.
you can run LAMP on an iSeries now if I'm not mistaken.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"If we look at some other Stephen Shankland articles on C|Net we find that they tend to be very simple and formulaic, without any technical detail whatsoever. "
Ummm. We're talking about a Cnet audience there. If we wanted nonformulific, and complex stories filled with technical details, we'd read slashdot.
"I would think there would be a healthy market for a 'cell accelerator card', especially in the world I come from (Modeling and Simulation)..."
Or you could get a DX10 card and use CUDA
Where is the "imagine a beowulf cluster os these" comment?
Oh, here it is.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though
256k is for an SPE. The Cell CPU itself is currently configured for 256mb.
The intent is to make the high-end Cells (with all 8 SPEs working) cheap by selling millions of PS3s with lower-grade (6 SPEs) Cells, a scale economy that big machines ("mainframes") couldn't achieve on their own.
They're not going to be running "games" like VirtuaFighter on mainframes, especially not without the 9x as fast RSX video chip the PS3 includes. But they will be allowing us to run supercomputer-fast Monte Carlo simulations on PS3 under Linux.
So I guess if their marketdroids keep lying to us about making IBM mainframes into game consoles, it's worth it if they keep delivering the reverse, which is much more interesting.
--
make install -not war
I thought the PS3 was over priced at $600.
You got it all mixed up, folks. If anything, the headline should've been "IBM Adds Mainframe Chips to Videogame Consoles" when the PS3's architecture was first announced - it was always clear that the Cell would be used for more than just a console.
butter the donkey
Yeah, babe, IBM pwnz!
diginferno
I think the Cell in the PS3 has 7 SPEs enabled (one is disabled to increase manufacturing yields, similar to what often happens with GPU pipelines).
Of course, the PS3 operating system permanently reserves one of the SPUs to itself. (The Xbox360 does a similar thing, reserving half the CPU time of one of the 6 PPC instruction pipelines it has to the OS).
What I really want to know is when am I going to see OS/400 on a PS3? Remember the OS/400 on a PS2 post?
Yet another increase in number of suckers that IBM managed to fool into buying its clumsy CPU...
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It is a common trolling tactic used on /.
You must be new here etc etc
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Spoken like a true teenage dingbat who thinks the PS/3/Wii/XBox360 (pick your fanboi allegience) is the pinnacle of the worlds computing achievements.
Congratulations on being an ignorant toolbox.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
The only reason the cell processor is on the mainframe is to accelerate certain things which perform poorly on the mainframe such as Java or web serving. Anyone who has worked on the IBM mainframe with Java will know this. Java works there, it just doesn't perform well at all. With this in mind, I don't see this used much for gaming. Hopefully, the cell is used for virtual mainframe Linux instances which seems to make more sense.
This isn't where I would have expected IBM to put Cells; from the first announcements several years ago of Cells and of the Blue Gene architecture, everyone's asked 'when do we get a Blue Gene made of Cells?'
... I wasn't there, I've only got the one-paragraph description from the program, but the major features are that double-precision processing is now pipelined so you get 100GFLOP/chip (two flops per fmul instruction * 3.2GHz * 8 SPEs * 2 doubles per vector-register) and that the memory system is now four-channel DDR2 of up to 16GB, rather than RDRAM of up to 2GB.
That may be something that has to wait for the 65nm 'Cell 2' which IBM described at Cool Chips X
[but this chip uses 100 watts, and a 16GB DDR2 memory system would be 64 chips, so it wouldn't fit in the racking or remotely in the cooling of current bluegene]
Just out of curiosity, where is the forum for interesting things done using Linux-on-PS3? I am expecting truly wonderful demos to crop up at scene.org in the medium-term future.