A Look Into The Cell Architecture 318
ball-lightning writes "This article attempts to decipher the patent filed by the STI group (IBM, Sony, and Toshiba) on their upcoming Cell technology (most notably going to be used in the PS3). If it's as good as this article claims, the Cell chip could eventually take over the PC market."
Dupe! (Score:4, Insightful)
Timothy do you actually read Slashdot?
x86 (Score:4, Insightful)
Its a dupe (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe slashcode should have a link repository, if someone adds a new story with a link, they get a warning another story pointing to the same link was posted 18 hours ago...
We've even seen triple-dupes.
Looks like we need to throw all computers out (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:x86 (Score:2, Insightful)
Dupe!-Was it as good for you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a better question. If he will not, why should we?
Transmeta (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a distributed-processing-capable chip. They're moving software into the chip, doing what software can do in a more compact and probably more efficient way. There's nothing revolutionary here and besides being a dupe story it's way overrated. The only attractive here is the fact PS3 will use it instead of embedding something open, like Mosix.
And no it won't "eventually take over the PC market."
Some Thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all I want to say I think it is completly possible to make a processor with 8APUs and so forth. For starters PowerPC chips already have several seperate execution units on them, and I think they use fewer transitors than intel chips. Moreover, a huge chunk of the transitor budget goes to doing things like cache consistancy or complicated instruction prediction which is probably not used on the much simpler APUs.
Of course it seems like this is primarily of interest to game systems or signal processing applications (note that a 4 threaded 32 stream processors is just another way of saying 4 cell procesors, each has a PPC core with 8 APUs). However, I would not be so quick to dismiss this for the PC market. While it may be true that many individual applications may not easily multi-thread it seems we are approaching a point where the biggest complaint is not the maximum processing rate in one application but the ability to run multiple applications at once. On my computers I'm rarely if ever frustrated at the rate some program is running at, but slowdown in other programs when I run a processor intensive job or turn on a video. So while drawing a webpage may not be speed up by this processor drawing several webpages at the same time will be and that is the sort of thing which makes a big difference for the end user.
Also, a processor like this offers great possibilities for JIT and VM code. The main thread can dispatch instructions and threads to the APUs dynamically based on what is happening in the system. Also I find it interesting that IBM is going the same way as intel in pushing all the complexity on the compiler. It makes one wonder if itanium is really as dead as everyone thinks. Perhaps in 4 years when AMD can't squeeze anything more out of x86 intel will be ready to jump in having worked out all the bugs to their new chip.
Re:Dupe! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't that be like eating from the toilet?
Treacherous Computing (Score:2, Insightful)
If, for example, HDTV set-top boxes supported email, Word, and spreadsheets, it'd happen pretty quickly.
I'm not buying a console-style computer until it supports GCC out of the box. I want the freedom to compile my own software for a given machine and distribute it without having to go through a console maker that refuses to even talk to individual developers and smaller firms.
Re:There are always critical sections (Score:2, Insightful)
Not really. Current gaming computers are usually bogged down while trying to display a graphical-intense game. Home electronics are composed of video and audio. Much of 2D and 3D visualization and audio are "embarrassing parallel problems". Take the video encoding/decoding example from the article, you don't need to parallelize a video frame in terms of each pixel elements, instead, one opts to parallelize each video encoding process that doesn't have "critical sections". Not only can types of procedures be parallelized, a lot of for loops can also be unwound so that they, too, can be split up onto multiple processors.
Re:Not Again! (Score:2, Insightful)
For my rebuttal,
AMD is better yet cheaper, Linux is better yet cheaper. WTF? guess i'll STFU.
Re:Dupe! (Score:3, Insightful)
he's buying the sony propaganda on full throttle, probably wasn't around couple of years when they did the EXACT same thing with ps2 - overhyping it to the max.
it's not some revolution chip that will give you a desktop with 4x the power for cheapo cheap..
Re:Transmeta (Score:2, Insightful)
The only attractive here is the fact PS3 will use it instead of embedding something open, like Mosix
I'm not sure if you're praising or knocking Mosix (or more accurately, OpenMosix), but the method by which OpenMosix migrates processes bears very little resemblance to Cell. OpenMosix's redeeming quality is binary compatibility with most, if not all, existing software written for whatever architecture the cluster is running on. Cell resembles MPI more than Mosix, by far, in that software will have to be recompiled to take full advantage of Cell's capabilities. No, the OS will not automagically solve everything.
(Yes, I work with an OpenMosix cluster)
Talk is cheap, and hollow hype is worthless. (Score:3, Insightful)
And if I had 4 legs, I could outrun a dog.
But I don't, so I can't. And this chip won't be as good as the (overenthusiastic) article claims. It won't take over the PC market.
This chip will take over the PC market the same way that BitBoys took over the graphics card market; the same way that Transmeta took over the mobile CPU market; the same way that the Elbrus 2k took over the desktop CPU market. That way is: deliver endless hype that you can't possibly back up. By the time it hits the market, the hype will be so built up that people won't be able to help but to feel let down by the chip. Then they'll lose interest in the product.
This chip might be fast for the money, and enable them to put 4 cores in a consumer device like the Playstation, but it's not going to outperform (or even match) a CPU like the P4 or Athlon 64.
When will people learn to stop falling for the same tricks?
Re:Transmeta (Score:3, Insightful)
Steve Jobs, Vectors and OS X (Score:2, Insightful)
He also sold tens of thousands of these boxes to a government agency who's name is Not Said Aloud. Seems their early APU-like design was very good at some important things.
Cells are the Next big thing. PS3 will indeed kick ass - real time virtual video - and so will future Macs. Maybe they'll be the same thing, eventually.
Oh, BTW, was that Sony's head on stage at MacWorld?
This is big and deserves duping. But we'll wait for the next time its /. to consider what you'd do if you were Sun, Intel, or Microsoft
Re:They reinvented The Amiga! (Score:3, Insightful)
4 Cells? (Score:2, Insightful)
Whether one can install user-created content (Score:2, Insightful)
by that request [of availability of a compiler to the general public] i take it that your os of choice is either linux or some bsd variant.
As of early 2005, two leading desktop operating systems are Microsoft Windows XP and a FreeBSD variant [apple.com]. Windows supports GCC out of the box: use IE to download Firefox, and use Firefox to download MinGW.
this puts you outside of the user group a console style computer would be aimed for
It's not me as much as my audience. If I write a program, say a simple Tetris clone with a gimmick, I may want to GPL it and publish it on the Internet for download, not mailbomb every licensed game publisher, hoping beyond hope that one will take a game from a complete unknown. Look at "Get It Now" and the GAGIN hack [rootarcana.com], used to get user-created content onto a BREW cell phone.