Posted on 12/18/2005 7:26:47 AM PST by SunkenCiv
IBM/SONY/TOSHIBA Cell Chip:With nine processors and 234 million transistors, the Cell is the powerhouse of Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3 console. The four-plus-gigahertz (depending on its application) chip calculates an unmatched 256 billion operations per second, making it 35 times as fast as the PS2's chip. The upshot: Characters react more realistically (like flinching when bullets whiz by). Next year Toshiba will offer an HDTV set that uses the chip to decode high-def signals.
Supercomputing power on a single chip
Popular Science
November 2005
ping
I thought this was gonna be about 'cell' phones. I was getting my credit card out as I clicked the link.
Oh man....now Solitaire is really going to re-deal fast!
A four-core chip home server system will be able to deliver one billion floating-point operations per second, apparently. Move up to a 32-core chip - in, say, a blade server module - and you'd get 32 gigaflops of processing power, while a 64-core slab of silicon inside a rack-mount unit doing graphics work would churn out two teraflops, according to Kutaragi's presentation foils.
uhhhh... does this mean that when I play Minesweeper I can break 180?
Or... does it just mean that Pop Up ads will load faster?
Introducing the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell ProcessorIBM's Cell embodies many of the "RISC redivivus" principles outlined above, but it comes at these concepts from a completely different angle. Like TM, IBM started out with the intention of increasing microprocessor performance, but unlike TM, simplifying processor control logic wasn't the magic ingredient that would make this happen. Instead, IBM attacked from the very outset the problem that TM ran headlong into: the memory latency gap. IBM's solution to the memory latency problem is at once both simple and complex. In its most basic form IBM's Cell does what computer architects have been doing since the first cache was invented — Cell moves a small bit of memory closer to the execution units, and lets the processor store frequently-used code and data in that local memory. The actual implementation of this idea is a bit more complicated, but it's still fairly easy to grasp.
Part I: the SIMD processing units
by Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Monday, February 07, 2005
Introducing the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell ProcessorFinally, before signing off, I should clarify my earlier remarks to the effect that I don't think that Apple will use this CPU. I originally based this assessment on the fact that I knew that the SPUs would not use VMX/Altivec. However, the PPC core does have a VMX unit. Nonetheless, I expect this VMX to be very simple, and roughly comparable to the Altivec unit o the first G4. Everything on this processor is stripped down to the bare minimum, so don't expect a ton of VMX performance out of it, and definitely not anything comparable to the G5. Furthermore, any Altivec code written for the new G4 or G5 would have to be completely reoptimized due to inorder nature of the PPC core's issue.
Part II: The Cell Architecture
by Jon "Hannibal" Stokes
Monday, February 08, 2005
This is Sony's way of staying competitive with the Xbox 360. It's amazing that this cutting-edge technology is being driven by the gaming community rather than business demands. If that kind of power is deliverable on a game console, it will soon find its way into business PCs, allowing those applications to continue their evolution.
Completion of Sony's CELL nearsThe new CELL chip could be used as many as eight times in the PS3, and is designed with communication and graphical related routines in mind. The CELL is also specifically created to be used 'en masse', with multiple processors linked to break-up larger processing tasks.
by Luke Guttridge
17th Sep 2004
PS3 with Cell processor to clobber Xbox 360 in 2006Sony boasted that the PS3 and its custom-designed "Cell" chip would have twice the processing speed of the Xbox 360, the new console from Microsoft... It will also feature a built-in Ethernet port for high-speed Internet access, as well as two different types of wireless networking and a removable small hard drive. "PS3 truly is the system to be placed in the center of living rooms in homes around the world," Ken Kutaragi, the head of Sony’s game unit, said... With a radical new design that includes nine separate processors, with one controlling "brain" that will divvy up tasks among its eight peers, the Cell has been touted by developers as a middle ground between the traditionally separate graphics processors and central processors, with advantages over both. Despite this very different format, which will allow programmers to draw on some of the lessons of grid computing, Sony has said developers will be able to use many of the tools they’re familiar with to build games for the new system.
by Neo
Macsimum
May 17, 2005
IBM Discloses Cell Based Blade Server Board PrototypeThe prototype, called the Cell Processor Based Blade Server, measured approximately 23 x 43 cm. Each board featured two Cell processors, two 512 Mb XDR DRAM chips and two South Bridge LSIs. The Cell processors were demonstrated running at 2.4-2.8 GHz. "We are driving the Cell processors at higher rates in the laboratory," said the engineer. "If operated at 3 GHz, Cell's theoretical performance reaches about 200 GFLOPS, which works out to about 400 GFLOPS per board," he added. IBM plans to release a rack product capable of storing seven of these boards.
May 25, 2005 14:17
l o l
Gracias for inclusion with such august company.
IBM, Sony, Toshiba unveil nine-core Cell processor...its performance should reach 10 times the capability of current PC processors... The prototype chip discussed Monday is comprised of one 64-bit Power PC processor core and eight separate processing cores... The cores can support multiple operating systems and programming models through the use of virtualization technologies... A single-core processor can be set up to process multiple instruction threads at the same time, but must ultimately run faster and faster to improve its performance, which generates heat. Multicore processors can execute instructions in parallel, which means multiple separate instruction threads can be processed at the same time. By moving to multiple-core designs, chip designers can extract more performance from their products while reducing power consumption and heat dissipation. The Cell designers have figured out how to push both frequency and parallelism, Kahle said. Cell is capable of running at more than 4.5GHz... Cell will probably consume around 30 watts of power... similar to the power consumption of Intel Corp.'s Pentium M... The dual-threaded PowerPC core functions as a control processor for the other eight single-threaded SPEs... The SPEs have 256KB of cache memory on each core, while the PowerPC core uses 32KB of Level 1 cache and 512KB of Level 2 cache... With Cell capable of handling 10 instruction threads at a given time, the chip needs extremely fast memory and I/O buses to ensure the processing engine is continuously fueled with data, Warmke said. The XDR bus runs at 3.2GHz, while the FlexIO bus runs at 6.4GHz... Cell is fairly large, with a die size of 221 square millimeters. The latest version of the Pentium M is only about 84 square millimeters... high-volume shipments of the processor will come when the three companies are ready to make chips using a 65-nanometer processing technology, Glaskowsky said. That technology will allow the companies to shrink the chip and reduce their manufacturing costs, he said.
by Tom Krazit
IDG News Service
MacWorld
Feb 7 2005
August? I thought this was December!
One last link, I'm too tired to build another quote.
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell4_v2.html
Ironically, the pop-up ads will be for Xbox 360. Of course, that's assuming the use of an MS browser. ;')
Just email me the number and expiry, it'll only take a minute. ;')
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