A Glimpse Inside the Cell Processor

XenoPhage writes "Gamasutra has up an article by Jim Turley about the design of the Cell processor, the main processor of the upcoming Playstation 3. It gives a decent overview of the structure of the cell processor itself, including the CBE, PPE, and SPE units." From the article: "Remember your first time? Programming a processor, that is. It must have seemed both exciting and challenging. You ain't seen nothing yet. Even garden-variety microprocessors present plenty of challenges to an experienced programmer or development team. Now imagine programming nine different processors all at once, from a single source-code stream, and making them all cooperate. When it works, it works amazingly well. But making it work is the trick."

Re:memory speed?

[Janek Kozicki]

oops, sorry. It was taken out of context, and false. That "local memory" was the memory of graphic card, which is rarely read from (but often written), and that "main memory" (with nice speed 16GB/sec) was actually the system RAM.

Re:memory speed?

[Space cowboy]

You are misinformed.

This is the speed at which the Cell can read RSX's local memory. Memory bandwidth for the Cell itself is ~25 GB/sec. If the Cell ever wants to access the private RAM of the RSX (why ?) it *is* possible, but it's a lot more efficient to use the normal pathway through main memory...

Simon.

Re:memory speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "picking". You render your objects using only color (no texture data); one color per object. Then you can read the color that lies directly under the mouse cursor. A simple lookup will tell you which object is under the cursor. It's only efficient in terms of implementation time. I'm sure most game development houses have very nice ray casting functions built into the engines they use, so you are right about it being of very little use. Just thought I'd answer your question.