IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor

angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."

Comments

With more memory per CPU, it might not suck

[Animats]

The basic problem with the Cell processor is that it has 256KB (not MB, KB) per processor, plus a bulk transfer mechanism to main memory. Given that model, it has to be programmed like a DSP - very little state, processing works on data streams. For games, this sucks. No CPU has enough memory for a full frame, or for the geometry, or a level map. Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio.) In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O. And, of course, Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering.

But if each Cell CPU had, say, 16MB, the Cell machines could be treated more like a cluster. Programming for clusters is well understood, and not too tough.

It's probably too late, though. Multi-core shared memory cache-consistent machines are now too good. It's not necessary to use an architecture as painful as the Cell. It's probably destined for the graveyard of weird architectures, along with data flow machines, hypercubes, SIMD machines, systolic processors, semi-shared-memory multiprocessors, and similar hardware that's straightforward to build but tough to program.

Re:They could actually try to sell the Cell

[wowbagger]

I can go one better: I do signal processing for a living - chewing on multi-hundred megasample/second streams of data in real time. The Cell looked like a perfect fit. We were looking at 1000's per year. Contacted IBM - sorry, not enough zeros on that number for us to sell you the chips. OK, are there any vendors that are targeting the uTCA form factor (that the Telecomms folks are are all over, so they would not have been targeting just us)? Nope, just large blades for mainframes.

I assert that IBM doesn't want to be in the chip business - at least, not "selling chips to anybody else". They don't mind making chips for their own use, but they really don't have the infrastructure to sell to anybody else.

Sony and Toshiba don't want to be in the high-end CPU market, they want to be in the mass-market stuff.

Had IBM licensed the Cell design to somebody like Freescale, they might have gone somewhere.

Sorry, but I RTFA - and what I came away with was "We will continue to support Sony for as long as Sony wants to make PS3's". I saw nothing that really said "We are going to be going someplace else with this."