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Cell Hits 45nm, PS3 Price Drop Likely to Follow
Septimus writes "At this weeks ISSCC, IBM announced that the Cell CPU used in the PlayStation 3 will soon make the transition to IBM's next-gen 45nm high-k process. 'The 45nm Cell will use about 40 percent less power than its 65nm predecessor, and its die area will be reduced by 34 percent. The greatly reduced power budget will cut down on the amount of active cooling required by the console, which in turn will make it cheaper to produce and more reliable (this means fewer warrantied returns). Also affecting Sony's per-unit cost is the reduction in overall die size. A smaller die means a smaller, cheaper package; it also means that yields will be better and that each chip will cost less overall.'"
I don't know what it is about measuring things in nanometers and terabytes that gives me such a hardon.
Thank you IBM.
PS: Please don't put Skynet online.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
My only question is, will this reduce the cost?
This would be a great thing if they allow PS3/Linux users to access 7 of 8 SPUs instead of only six.
Otherwise, it's nice but not that big a deal...
This fits in well with the rumors of a slim version of the PS3 in the works. See here for more details.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
A price drop would be nice (though the PS3 is now competitive), but the more interesting bit is when is the PS3 slim going to appear. All the pieces are in place for a slim. Sony have been aggressively shrinking the motherboard in the PS3, and the chip size has dropped from 90nm, to 65nm and now 45nm. All that means less power (smaller PSU) and less heat (less fans & heatsinks). There have been other announcements such as thinner blu ray reader headers. It can only be a matter of time before a slim and I think it will hit before the holidays this year. I think it will sell by the shitload too when it does appear. The question is will we see a slim 360 to compete with it? I think there must be a lot of empty space in the 360 too.
The article mentions the cost savings to Sony (maybe they'll be passed on to the consumer...two or three years from now), but the real kicker is at the bottom where IBM apparently had to maintain cycle compatibility with the old chip to make sure they don't break any games. They didn't use the die shrink to optimize or enhance any parts of the chip like you normally would. The supercomputer folks might end up losing out a bit in an effort to keep the game console folks happy.
I read the internet for the articles.
Which is another important factor in bringing the price down. Percentage-wise with more die per wafer yields may go up as well; but in the end yields will be dependent on other things such as how good IBM is with its 45nm process.
I believe it's because the chip is smaller therefore more fit on the same size wafer.
It would be really great that they are moving to a smaller process, (/me takes deep breath)
IF THEY WOULD SELL YOU THE DAMN THINGS!
Where I work, we approached them to try to buy Cell processors for our equipment: the SPUs would make dandy DSP replacements, and we really could use the closer coupling of the processors instead of having a bunch of DSPs and spending all our time schlepping data around.
IBM wouldn't sell us any modules, wouldn't let us design our own CPU board, nothing. They seem supremely uninterested in actually getting these out into the hands of anybody other than their own divisions and Sony.
HEY IBM! How about you guys release these in a MicroTCA formfactor, or as a module that can be integrated into a MicroTCA?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Is the fact they've dropped hardware PS2 emulation.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Since when does going to a smaller process increase yields?
Always has.
Assume there will be 20 defects on a wafer that will render 19 large chips (out of 100) unusable. Your yield is 81%.
Same 20 defects, but affecting 20 small chips (out of 170). Now your yield is 88%, or 150 chips versus 81 chips per wafer.
The number of defect sites per wafer is generally rather constant, thus the more chips you can fit on a wafer, the better the yield.
If' they're dropping cooling components due to lower heat output, I wonder if that means this picture is for real.
Moore's law is dead. Atoms aren't getting any smaller. With 5 atoms thick, when you try and go to 2.5 atoms thick, let me know and I'll get far away.
Power supplies also generate a lot of heat -- notice that those bricks tend to be warm under load, even through that insulation. Put them inside the laptop and you're adding a bunch of heat to a place that you want to be removing heat from. So you need bigger fans and it takes even more space. It's just unworkable.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
The reason is that wafer size doesn't change. I don't remember what is current, 8 inch I believe (that's the largest I've seen) but regardless. So when you reduce the size of an individual chip, you get more chips per wafer. Now unless the percentage of chips that fail increases, that means you get a better yield/wafer.
Well cost is based per wafer. It doesn't cost any more to make a wafer with 1000 small chips than it does to make one with 4 big chips. In either case it is the same size wafer, same mask, same process, etc.
Now yield could go down if a company has problems with a new process. Suppose that the old process yields 10% non-working chips per wafer. You get a new process that yields 20% more chips per wafer than the old one, however now 50% of them are non-working. That would equal a lower yield, despite the more chips per wafer.
However assuming a roughly equal failure rate, shrinking the die size will increase the yield.
Simply put, they reduce the cost of production, they lose less money on each one they sell. Considering the Playstation 3 is slowly gaining market share at it's current price, they have no need to drop the price right away.
~Mike (Titan_X)
That's ancient news. Since then, the blue laser shortage has ended, and Sony has gotten the costs of PS3 manufacture down to under $400.
The size of a defect is of a fixed size. Usually it is a particle of dust that got in the way of the optical etching process. The distribution of such defects is even across the surface of the silicon wafer, so the distribution can be modelled mathematically.
Suppose there are 20 defects across the wafer. If your chip were the size of the entire wafer, it would be guaranteed to be defective.
Try half the size of the wafer, and there would be on average 10 defects. A quarter of the wafer, 5 defects. If you have a chip that is one hundredth the size of a single wafer, then the odds are now in your favour; on average 20/100 that you will have a defect, 80/100 that you will not.
The Cell processor is etched with eight processors anyway. If one is defective, they can ignore it, otherwise if all eight are working, then they will just deactivate one.
I wonder how long it will be before they start adding more processors to the chip.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Relevance of CBE beyond PS3 of course depends in large degree on its computing performance. For the applications I've looked at, I haven't been very impressed. They say it does 204GFLOPS, but approaching that requires being able to use all multiply-add instructions, which count as two operations. (Some sources say the two operations per clock cycle per SPU is due to there being two pipelines, however, only one of the pipelines handles arithmentic operations and the other is exclusively for load, store, control, and a few shift operations.) Also, it seems to take a lot of select, shift, and shuffle instructions to make efficient use of the quadword (SIMD) instructions. With Xeon and Opteron, use of the quadword instructions seems to require far fewer other additional cycles. And this is with floats, with instruction related stalls completely eliminated on CBE through careful loop unrolling and other methods. (The quadword instructions have 6 cycle latencies.) I can only get performance comparable to 2 quad-core Xeons, which doesn't seem that good considering what is advertized, and considering the 4x difference in the peak performance specs. And CBE does much worse where double precision is necessary, with 6 cycle stalls being unaviodable on every instruction. It seems overblown. Comments?
Last I heard, Sony was still losing a ton of money on every PS3 they sold. So even if this upgrade makes it significantly cheaper to manufacture PS3s, I don't see why that would lead to a drop in retail price.
If anything, I'd guess Sony wants to keep the PS3 at its current price, now that they've basically won the next-gen DVD skirmish. Plenty of people who want Blu-Ray players probably already see the PS3 as a good choice (just like I bought a PS2 to play DVDs back in the days of yore).
Not so long as the consoles continue to sell at the current price. Sony charges what they think people are willing to pay, no more and no less.
That's a very simplistic view. First, "people" is a collection of persons all willing to pay different prices. So, there's no one price at which "people" will buy, and another at which "people" won't buy.
A company selling a product will try to maximize the profits. Once the cost of production goes down, the "maximum profit" formula changes -- you will either get more profit per unit, or you will sell at the same profit but sell more... or do something in between. The new magic "maximum profit" price will almost certainly be different than before.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
The redundancy of the Cell's 8 SPUs (DSP coprocessors) is the main point of the Cell's design. Defective SPUs (nearly always from dust particles in the nearly - but not quite - perfect "clean rooms" in which they're manufactured) can be tested and turned off as they roll off the assembly line. The shut down SPUs are even physically disconnected from power by hard fuses, so they don't cost any performance in operation. The perfect Cells with 8 SPUs cost the most, in high-end IBM RS/6000 workstations (and some blade servers). 7 SPUs go into PS3s. The rest of the yield, supposedly down to a single SPU (but even 0 SPUs still have a 3.2GHz PPC and superfast IO), go into HDTVs and other consumer electronics. All of the yield gets sold, instead of a fraction in older manufacturing processes.
So smaller dies don't really affect Cell yields. Smaller dies just mean smaller parts of the wafer that would get spoiled by a single defect, which is already taken care of with the redundant SPUs.
In fact, smaller dies mean multiple defects are less likely to land on a single die. Which means that more Cells would turn into low-SPU, cheaper Cells. While larger dies would concentrate multiple defects into a single dies, by landing on a single die more often, leaving more perfect Cells getting the highest prices.
45nm does mean more Cells, at any defect rate, per wafer. Which means, for the same number of defects per wafer, more dies per wafer. So there is a yield increase, but not for the same reasons as traditional ones. And of course 45nm has so many other valuable benefits, like speed, and more transistors if they keep the same die size, that the move is very valuable overall.
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make install -not war
The PS3 is interesting because it's so much power in such a cheap box, but it's subsidized by Sony. I think Sony will be lowering prices less while reducing the subsidy more.
But where are the Cell PCs already? The PS3 is cute, but it's locked down with a Sony hypervisor, it's got no PCI or other expansion, only a single SATA connector, and a puny 512MB hardwired RAM (its Cell can rip through 512MB, peforming 64bit floating point math on it all, in under 0.0025s). Its RSX video chip is locked out from Linux, so no HW acceleration (and no addon videocard is possible).
IBM is now cranking out these chips. It lost Apple, its biggest CPU (PPC) customer, to Intel. Where's a PC built on a Cell that includes PCI-e, expandible XDR RAM, Gb-e networking, and a more open nVidia graphics card (or two)? Since the Cell is cheap due to its higher yields, a $1000 Cell PC could make a $1000 Intel PC (Mac or Windows/Linux/etc) look like a 286 with its extremely high speeds. Sony has proven it can be mass manufactured with mostly commodity parts for under $750.
Since Ubuntu already runs on Cell, a cheap Windows killer could take the Cell architecture to the top of the CPU stakes in record time from release. It would be a much easier/cheaper/faster target for porting PS3 games than Intel PCs. Apple, which supposedly dropped PPC for Intel because of heat:performance limitations, would have to look seriously at a return to PPC, especially since 45nm Cell with only a few SPUs could be a perfect fit for an iPhone successor. If not from Apple, then from someone smart enough to use Cell in the biggest market of all.
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make install -not war
A 40% drop in heat will make a huge difference in the suitability for business application of the PS3. (Before you say that business use of a PS3 is contradictory, please consider the accommodation industry.)
The instant they can get a PS3 (or an Xbox) that does not spew heat and use fans akin to a Boeing, it will have a place in the entertainment centers in luxury accommodation suites around the world. The region free PS3 game discs will seal the deal. Surfing internet on the TV and being able to show photos straight from your memory card is also a plus.
Late last year, we tried rolling the current model of PS3s into some guest suites. In the end there was no way to accomplish this without a major retooling of the entertainment centers, costing hundreds of dollars extra per unit. In one case the excess heat generated by the PS3 caused the TV to overheat!!
The drop in power bills will also be a big plus, as guests will generally never be bothered to switch off an appliance. I had thought that the PS3s were supposed to automatically regulate the amount of processor power needed. But they seem to run as many fans even when idling at the top menu.
For business use the maintainability and operation costs are a much bigger factor than the original cost per unit. If they can actually get the heat under control, Sony will break into a huge new market of corporate clients.
Defectivity (i.e. the "dust problem") is just one of the yield detractors. There are many more and they get worse and worse. For instance, there are litho problems, etching problems, CMP problems, not to mention gate leakage, and a bunch of other parametric issues. So, you can not just look at defectivity. Even if you did, with a smaller feature size, small particles that could be tolerated in an older generation will now cause yield loss.
PS: the distribution you are talking about is a poisson distribution
Here I am, replying to AC... Slow day indeed.
Sorry, but you are wrong (as your moderation points out).
You can buy a PS3 to do numerics and the Cell inside it is an average performer. Not bad at all for under $1000.
But, if you need to upgrade (and consider your workload is heavily parallelized and optimized for the SPUs because it already runs on your PS3's SPUs) you can buy one or more IBM QS21 blades and a suitable chassis. It's obvious these new Cells will be in these blades as soon as they become available. In the blades, the Cell is not limited as it is in the PS3, there is plenty of memory for the PPUs and you can run all your SPUs at full throttle if your data and programs demand it. And, while you are at it, you can add POWER or x86 blades to the chassis as well as Linux does not run particularly fast on the Cell PPUs and you may want a fast machine to feed the Cell node.
Sorry if you wanted current supercomputer power on the cheap. The PS3 is good enough for a lot of stuff and a lot cheaper than anything that approaches its numeric performance.
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