Official *** CELL processor announements **** Thread
- Thread starter sonycowboy
- Start date
TekunoRobby
Tag of Excellence
Only between the tech geeks and that has existed before technology itself. Just smile and admire the beauty of technology.Bud said:
I read up on the Cell stuff (partly thanks to this thread and B3D), pretty cool stuff!
sonycowboy
Member
TekunoRobby
Tag of Excellence
Hopefully E3 will be an excellent showcase of the product, in terms of gaming of course. I'm pretty sure all parties involved with beging to heavily promote this product rather soon.jimbo said:
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
Yeah, that's realtime rendered in hi-def on PS3.
*edit* using one SPU only.
Hiro_Kunimi_80
Member
Marconelly said:
LOL
http://home.businesswire.com/portal...50207005340&newsLang=en&contentItemId=1216538
"Caption:
IBM Analysis Engineer Tami Vogel holds a prototype of the new Cell microprocessor,"
REAL ........... girl..
Hitler Stole My Potato
Banned
Marconelly said:
Nigger, please.
That's just a photo.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
Nah, I met this one drunk SquareEnix guy in a pub in UK, and he told me that's a 3D model from their next game.
No shit, Sherlock...
Doom_Bringer
Banned
Hitler Stole My Potato said:
banned!
I think Marc was being sarcastic.
Hiro_Kunimi_80 said:LOL
http://home.businesswire.com/portal...50207005340&newsLang=en&contentItemId=1216538
"Caption:
IBM Analysis Engineer Tami Vogel holds a prototype of the new Cell microprocessor,"
REAL ........... girl..
She has a mustache......
Hitler Stole My Potato
Banned
Marconelly said:
No need to get pissy. It's hard to tell if you were trying for the "funny" or just being an idiot.
sonycowboy
Member
Hitler Stole My Potato said:
:lol :lol :lol
... and he's being pissy?
Hiro_Kunimi_80
Member
the power of CELLmarsomega said:
Hitler Stole My Potato
Banned
sonycowboy said:
I blaming my dickishness today on my appendicitis.
Dunno if this has been posted yet:
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality
Published: February 7, 2005, 12:15 PM PST
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
SAN FRANCISCO--The chip that will run the next version of the PlayStation video game machine will have nine processor cores and run faster than 4GHz, the chip's designers revealed Monday.
Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba revealed those and other specifications for the Cell processor during a press conference at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where technical papers on the Cell design will be presented this week.
The three companies have been working on Cell for several years, promising to deliver a high-performance chip optimized for multimedia applications. Test production of Cell chips is set to begin later this year, and the processors will appear later in workstation PCs optimized for animation and other graphics chores. The chip will also power the next version of Sony's PlayStation game console, which is widely expected to be released late this year or early next year.
While analysts and researchers have already puzzled out most of the basic aspects of the Cell design, Monday's announcements included some of the first specifics.
Cell will have a 64-bit IBM Power processor and eight "synergistic processing units" capable of handling separate computing tasks, said Jim Kahle, an IBM Fellow. The Power processor will act as the brain of the chip, running the main operating system for an application and divvying up chores for the other processors.
The multicore design will give software developers tremendous flexibility, Kahle said, allowing them to run multiple operating systems on the same chip and experiment with variations on grid computing.
"It's designed from the beginning to work in a world where all the computers are tied together," he said.
Future versions of Cell chips could have more or fewer processing units depending on what device and software designers require, Kahle said. "There are a number of different ways to implement parallelism on the chip," he said.
How those processing units are used is up to software developers, including the game makers who will soon start wrestling with the PlayStation 3. Kahle said IBM and its Cell partners will provide game developers and other code writers with open-source tools and guidelines for working with Cell but that game developers will have final say on how they chop up computing tasks among the processing units.
"It's really...up to the game developer," he said. "You can program it in many different ways."
Other Cell numbers include the following.
The first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague about how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz.
Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), falling a wee bit short of marketing hyperbole calling it a "supercomputer on a chip." The slowest machine on the current list of the Top 500 supercomputers can do 851 gigaflops.
The chip will have 2.5MB of on-chip memory and have the ability to shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to 100 gigabytes per second, using XDR and FlexIO interface technology licensed from Rambus.
"One of the key messages you hear from the architects of next-generation chips is that their performance is being limited by off-chip bandwidth," said Rich Warmke, product marketing manager at Rambus. "We've really licked that with Cell. One hundred gigabytes per second is really unprecedented in the industry."
The chip will have 234 million transistors, measure 221mm square and be produced using advanced 90-nanometer chipmaking processes. Peter Glaskowsky, a consultant at research company The Envisioneering Group, said he expects Cell production to shift to a 65-nanometer process, however, as IBM introduces the chipmaking technology later this year.
While the PlayStation 3 is likely to be the first mass-market product to use Cell, the chip's designers have said the flexible architecture means that Cell will be useful for a wide range of applications, from servers to cell phones. Initial devices are unlikely to be any smaller than a game console, however--the first version of the Cell will run hot enough to require a cooling fan, Kahle said.
Some competitors, however, are skeptical that Cell will find much of a home outside of video games. One of the big problems with Cell, said Justin Rattner, an Intel Fellow, is that the processing units aren't identical, a situation that increases complexity and the opportunity for bugs.
"You've got this asymmetry," Rattner said. "It's like having two kinds of motors under the hood. We are very reluctant to adopt architectures like this because they take compatibility and throw it out the window."
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality
Published: February 7, 2005, 12:15 PM PST
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
SAN FRANCISCO--The chip that will run the next version of the PlayStation video game machine will have nine processor cores and run faster than 4GHz, the chip's designers revealed Monday.
Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba revealed those and other specifications for the Cell processor during a press conference at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where technical papers on the Cell design will be presented this week.
The three companies have been working on Cell for several years, promising to deliver a high-performance chip optimized for multimedia applications. Test production of Cell chips is set to begin later this year, and the processors will appear later in workstation PCs optimized for animation and other graphics chores. The chip will also power the next version of Sony's PlayStation game console, which is widely expected to be released late this year or early next year.
While analysts and researchers have already puzzled out most of the basic aspects of the Cell design, Monday's announcements included some of the first specifics.
Cell will have a 64-bit IBM Power processor and eight "synergistic processing units" capable of handling separate computing tasks, said Jim Kahle, an IBM Fellow. The Power processor will act as the brain of the chip, running the main operating system for an application and divvying up chores for the other processors.
The multicore design will give software developers tremendous flexibility, Kahle said, allowing them to run multiple operating systems on the same chip and experiment with variations on grid computing.
"It's designed from the beginning to work in a world where all the computers are tied together," he said.
Future versions of Cell chips could have more or fewer processing units depending on what device and software designers require, Kahle said. "There are a number of different ways to implement parallelism on the chip," he said.
How those processing units are used is up to software developers, including the game makers who will soon start wrestling with the PlayStation 3. Kahle said IBM and its Cell partners will provide game developers and other code writers with open-source tools and guidelines for working with Cell but that game developers will have final say on how they chop up computing tasks among the processing units.
"It's really...up to the game developer," he said. "You can program it in many different ways."
Other Cell numbers include the following.
The first version of the chip will run at speeds faster than 4GHz. Engineers were vague about how much faster, but reports from design partners say 4.6GHz is likely. By comparison, the fastest current Pentium PC processor tops out at 3.8GHz.
Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), falling a wee bit short of marketing hyperbole calling it a "supercomputer on a chip." The slowest machine on the current list of the Top 500 supercomputers can do 851 gigaflops.
The chip will have 2.5MB of on-chip memory and have the ability to shuttle data to and from off-chip memory at speeds up to 100 gigabytes per second, using XDR and FlexIO interface technology licensed from Rambus.
"One of the key messages you hear from the architects of next-generation chips is that their performance is being limited by off-chip bandwidth," said Rich Warmke, product marketing manager at Rambus. "We've really licked that with Cell. One hundred gigabytes per second is really unprecedented in the industry."
The chip will have 234 million transistors, measure 221mm square and be produced using advanced 90-nanometer chipmaking processes. Peter Glaskowsky, a consultant at research company The Envisioneering Group, said he expects Cell production to shift to a 65-nanometer process, however, as IBM introduces the chipmaking technology later this year.
While the PlayStation 3 is likely to be the first mass-market product to use Cell, the chip's designers have said the flexible architecture means that Cell will be useful for a wide range of applications, from servers to cell phones. Initial devices are unlikely to be any smaller than a game console, however--the first version of the Cell will run hot enough to require a cooling fan, Kahle said.
Some competitors, however, are skeptical that Cell will find much of a home outside of video games. One of the big problems with Cell, said Justin Rattner, an Intel Fellow, is that the processing units aren't identical, a situation that increases complexity and the opportunity for bugs.
"You've got this asymmetry," Rattner said. "It's like having two kinds of motors under the hood. We are very reluctant to adopt architectures like this because they take compatibility and throw it out the window."
CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos contributed to this report
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
I see that in difficult times like these hardware unveilings, one has to be careful when cracking a joke!
sonycowboy
Member
Rhindle said:
Intel dissing the cell? The devil you say! And this in light of McFly's comment is pretty laughable.
McFly said:Haha, Intel must go crazy after this news. They released additional details on its Montecito chip today at the conference. 1.72 Billion transistors at 90 nm.
A one PE Cell chip has only 234M transistors and is much faster than that Intel chip.
So what about a 6PE Cell chip in PS3? Yeah, not exactly a fair comparision as you have to look what is memory and what logic, but still funny enough.
Fredi
wazoo said:
Depends on what you want to do. If you do something that is parallel in itself, than you could get to maybe 90 or even 95% of the peak performance, but if you want to do something serial where you need access to a big chunck of RAM, than it could be below 50%. Real world figures will be somewhere between.
Fredi
Phoenix
Member
IJoel said:Sing with me:
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!
Actually in this case it's: COMPILERS COMPILERS COMPILERS!
I would love to get my hands on a compiler for this and see an example of code and its corresponding disassembly.
Need 4 words this time out
PROFILERS DEBUGGERS ASSEMBLERS COMPILERS
DCharlie
And even i am moderately surprised
"but some parts of it sound a lot like what you'd find in a mainframe"
yup, at the risk of repeating myself, a lot of it sounds very similar...
then again, try writting a game on a mainframe (i did on a dec vax (Jet Pac and a few others), and there's only so far you can go with a secondary input terminal and an ascii main display!)
yup, at the risk of repeating myself, a lot of it sounds very similar...
then again, try writting a game on a mainframe (i did on a dec vax (Jet Pac and a few others), and there's only so far you can go with a secondary input terminal and an ascii main display!)
This is a technology conference, not some kind of trade show, I highly doubt we'll see "direct-feed" anything as I doubt whether we see any kind of graphics demonstration (and if we do it will have little bearing on PS3 since it will be completely removed from anything having to do with Nvidia's work on the GPU). They might release video of the presentations, but I'm not sure that's usually done. Have to wait for the transactions to become available.
CaptainABAB
Member
In terms of the pictures of the cell chip I have seen so far on this post, does that include the PowerPC portion?
Excellent! Too bad today was a shitty day at work, I would have liked to have tracked each new press release throughout the day. This sound good, and, as mentioned, in-line with expectations. ISSCC will really only confirm/deny the speculation before it. But the patents were fairly thorough, and the debate so exhausting that even someone like me that caught the tail end of it, there's little in the way of a suprise here. What I like is the die size. Why people think it will be a 90nm product is beyond me. It's already sampling at 65nm. That's what it will ship at for the PS3 IMO, with a 45nm die shrink off in the future. At 65nm, they can fit two PEs on the BE. Hell, they could probably go for broke with 4, but no point. Now I hope for a 2-16 PS3 CPU. We'll know soon enough.
Anyway, excellent work by STI. But this talk about challenging the Wintel dynasty is garbage. I'll believe it when I see it. Intel has so many resources they could always ditch x486 should push ever come to shove, and produce a Cell-killer of their own. Their problem has been legacy code. PEACE.
Anyway, excellent work by STI. But this talk about challenging the Wintel dynasty is garbage. I'll believe it when I see it. Intel has so many resources they could always ditch x486 should push ever come to shove, and produce a Cell-killer of their own. Their problem has been legacy code. PEACE.
Duckhuntdog
Member
Eeeek 8 cores??!!! Holy... Sony is going all out on this monster.