The SPEs that make up the bulk of the Cell's muscle are hard to use in games given the PS3's setup, and often you are waiting on the core to get data to and from them.
While I agree the SPEs are a pain in the neck to program for, one of their redeeming features is that they use asynchronous IO when writing/reading to/from main memory. One of the key design points with Cell was that modern processors spend an enormous amount of time waiting on memory operations to complete, something that gets worse when you introduce extra processors competing for memory cycles. An individual SPE can be reading in one set of data, writing back another, and processing a third all at the same time, there's no need to wait on data transfers.
Granted though, this is only actually useful in limited situations, they're rubbish for general logic operations.
The home office's website does actually say you have the right to remain silent.
I find the arguments surrounding freedom of speech interesting. While it'd be brilliant to be able to say what you like, there are still some cases where it isn't ideal: for example, there are laws against slander and libel. Then there's soliciting crime, encouraging racial hatred and similar. The government try to cut a fine line between what *needs* to be restricted, and what doesn't, and they do get it wrong - I agree censoring Gerry Adams was idiotic.
But if you RTFA, you'll find that the judge hearing the case ordered the leaked document to be removed from publication, but not to gag the press from talking about the fact that it had happened, nor to stop people reporting what was in it. This is not censorship, this is protecting confidentiality.
As for the UK not having free speach, name a particular UK law regulating it that you believe shouldn't be a crime.
Does anyone ever bother reading the *IBM* documents for this? Never mind what Sony have managed to do to the cell processor, if you turn to the IBM CBEA developers handbook (page 75), you will see:
"Load and store operations (LS), 6 Clock cycles Latency". And that's the time it takes for the instruction to complete, not to be issued to memory.
(3.2Ghz / 6 cycles) * 16 bytes != 16MB/s
Personally, I'm gonna bet on IBM being right, seeing how they're the ones who made the bloody thing. I don't trust the inquirer anyway, but if those figures are true, the most likely answer is inefficiencies in their benchmarking programs, (Such as instruction starvation, a nasty side effect of using SPU's)
Due to an EU directive, computer recycling will become compulsary in the UK in 2008: the related article here describes how the WEEE[sic] will force computer manufacturers to be responsible for their products, by providing a recycling service for *all* the electronic devices they sell.
It isn't actually a subroutine or variable: this is an actual assembley command "CPUID", or 0fh, a2h if you're an opcode obsessive like I am. It's used to retrieve information about the processor, such as caching, version details, and whether features such as MMX are present.
One of the uses is to retrieve the processors name: an intel processor will place the string "GenuineIntel" into registers, while an AMD will use "AuthenticAMD", I think. There is no way to get around this without getting your own, specially made AMD chip.
Cells big programming problem goes right down to each SPE: The assembler commands for which cannot actually address main memory! Every time information is read into / out of the 256K "local storage" on each SPE, a dma command must be issued. Now, while this is Cell's greatest asset (Execution continues while seriously slow memory movement occurs), it is also difficult to work with.
Your average C programmer doesn't take architecture into account, and so there's no user indication of whether a variable can be paged to maim memory, if code needs to be fetched, and crucially: how far in advance data can be pre-loaded into the local storage, to avoid the SPE hanging on a memory operation.
I'd guess that this new compiler will try to address these issues, which is suggested by the article.
Could we all just remember what IBM had in mind when they designed Cell? If you have a read of the Introduction [Pdf warning], you can see they identified the primary bottlenecks to performance, back in 2000, one of the most important problems being memory latency. Now, if you've done some work with assembler, you should know that every time you touch main memory, you loose about 20-30 clock cycles through your memory's low speed. If you want an example, I have a 3GHz computer, but the memory goes at 400Mhz. Just think how much time it must spend waiting for that memory?
Cell counters this problem by using SIMD in combination with what they call "Local Storage". Instead of having to wait for every single memory transfer, threads can read blocks of memory into storage actually on the SPE, process it, and then read it back. All with a couple of instructions, and execution continues even while the memory is been read/written.
The closest that present-day multi-processor computers can get to that is by caching the data. However, that still means that a cache miss will halt execution for many cycles, and each processor / core has to constantly check what other processors / cores have in their caches, ocassionally invalidating them.
What this all adds up to, is a level of efficiency that hasn't been seen before. However, I don't think it's gonna be anyway near "movie quality" graphics, you'd need a farm of Cells for that.
Yes it's an excuse, but with political reasons. The UK government is mustering evidence to support Labour's latest bill, seeking to increase the number of days "terrorists" can be held without charge to 90 days. Seeing how Blair's current majority in parliament is one (due to a recent vote), they're desperate to prove that law is needed. This article is probably just a tool to that end.
Yep, the Mountbatten building houses most of the electronic / microchip facilities for southampton. According to my brother (a student there), the fire's taken out the Clean Room, used for chip fab. Seeing how the cost for building clean rooms start in the millions, that's gotta hurt.
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The SPEs that make up the bulk of the Cell's muscle are hard to use in games given the PS3's setup, and often you are waiting on the core to get data to and from them.
While I agree the SPEs are a pain in the neck to program for, one of their redeeming features is that they use asynchronous IO when writing/reading to/from main memory. One of the key design points with Cell was that modern processors spend an enormous amount of time waiting on memory operations to complete, something that gets worse when you introduce extra processors competing for memory cycles. An individual SPE can be reading in one set of data, writing back another, and processing a third all at the same time, there's no need to wait on data transfers.
Granted though, this is only actually useful in limited situations, they're rubbish for general logic operations.
2Gb/s? The RSX is on the FlexIO bus, giving it ~20Gb/s to play with according to specs.
The home office's website does actually say you have the right to remain silent.
I find the arguments surrounding freedom of speech interesting. While it'd be brilliant to be able to say what you like, there are still some cases where it isn't ideal: for example, there are laws against slander and libel. Then there's soliciting crime, encouraging racial hatred and similar. The government try to cut a fine line between what *needs* to be restricted, and what doesn't, and they do get it wrong - I agree censoring Gerry Adams was idiotic.
But if you RTFA, you'll find that the judge hearing the case ordered the leaked document to be removed from publication, but not to gag the press from talking about the fact that it had happened, nor to stop people reporting what was in it. This is not censorship, this is protecting confidentiality.
As for the UK not having free speach, name a particular UK law regulating it that you believe shouldn't be a crime.
They're not advertising for the Met police.
Actually, if you count the PPC64 core that runs most of the OS, there *are* nine cores in total.
Does anyone ever bother reading the *IBM* documents for this? Never mind what Sony have managed to do to the cell processor, if you turn to the IBM CBEA developers handbook (page 75), you will see:
"Load and store operations (LS), 6 Clock cycles Latency". And that's the time it takes for the instruction to complete, not to be issued to memory.
(3.2Ghz / 6 cycles) * 16 bytes != 16MB/s
Personally, I'm gonna bet on IBM being right, seeing how they're the ones who made the bloody thing. I don't trust the inquirer anyway, but if those figures are true, the most likely answer is inefficiencies in their benchmarking programs, (Such as instruction starvation, a nasty side effect of using SPU's)
Due to an EU directive, computer recycling will become compulsary in the UK in 2008: the related article here describes how the WEEE[sic] will force computer manufacturers to be responsible for their products, by providing a recycling service for *all* the electronic devices they sell.
If the article writer can predict buyouts that will occur in 8 years time, then he must be good enough to tell me next week's lottery numbers, please.
It isn't actually a subroutine or variable: this is an actual assembley command "CPUID", or 0fh, a2h if you're an opcode obsessive like I am. It's used to retrieve information about the processor, such as caching, version details, and whether features such as MMX are present.
One of the uses is to retrieve the processors name: an intel processor will place the string "GenuineIntel" into registers, while an AMD will use "AuthenticAMD", I think. There is no way to get around this without getting your own, specially made AMD chip.
Cells big programming problem goes right down to each SPE: The assembler commands for which cannot actually address main memory! Every time information is read into / out of the 256K "local storage" on each SPE, a dma command must be issued. Now, while this is Cell's greatest asset (Execution continues while seriously slow memory movement occurs), it is also difficult to work with.
Your average C programmer doesn't take architecture into account, and so there's no user indication of whether a variable can be paged to maim memory, if code needs to be fetched, and crucially: how far in advance data can be pre-loaded into the local storage, to avoid the SPE hanging on a memory operation.
I'd guess that this new compiler will try to address these issues, which is suggested by the article.
Well, I can only say read this. Apparently, he's giving $600m to preventing TB.
Here's a thought though: Does it matter how much people give, or is it the reason that they give?
Could we all just remember what IBM had in mind when they designed Cell? If you have a read of the Introduction [Pdf warning], you can see they identified the primary bottlenecks to performance, back in 2000, one of the most important problems being memory latency. Now, if you've done some work with assembler, you should know that every time you touch main memory, you loose about 20-30 clock cycles through your memory's low speed. If you want an example, I have a 3GHz computer, but the memory goes at 400Mhz. Just think how much time it must spend waiting for that memory?
Cell counters this problem by using SIMD in combination with what they call "Local Storage". Instead of having to wait for every single memory transfer, threads can read blocks of memory into storage actually on the SPE, process it, and then read it back. All with a couple of instructions, and execution continues even while the memory is been read/written.
The closest that present-day multi-processor computers can get to that is by caching the data. However, that still means that a cache miss will halt execution for many cycles, and each processor / core has to constantly check what other processors / cores have in their caches, ocassionally invalidating them.
What this all adds up to, is a level of efficiency that hasn't been seen before. However, I don't think it's gonna be anyway near "movie quality" graphics, you'd need a farm of Cells for that.
Yes it's an excuse, but with political reasons. The UK government is mustering evidence to support Labour's latest bill, seeking to increase the number of days "terrorists" can be held without charge to 90 days. Seeing how Blair's current majority in parliament is one (due to a recent vote), they're desperate to prove that law is needed. This article is probably just a tool to that end.
Yep, the Mountbatten building houses most of the electronic / microchip facilities for southampton. According to my brother (a student there), the fire's taken out the Clean Room, used for chip fab. Seeing how the cost for building clean rooms start in the millions, that's gotta hurt.