Doom_Bringer
Banned
Borys said:
Yup!
Official *** CELL processor announements **** Thread
- Thread starter sonycowboy
- Start date
Yup!
That's nothing really. The beauty of the architecture lies in its scalability and software hierarchy. The power gains are made to come from stacking PEs. So some of the fud from today is that the PS3 will probably see 2 of these cores (PEs) in its CPU. That would be pretty badass IMO. But we'll see how they solve the powerhandling problems. People wigged out at the 85C temp, but I thought that was without a fan. I assume there was a heatsink, or something like it though. We'll see.Duckhuntdog said:
Oh yeah, Rambus gets a lot of stick for a company that's still developing great new products. 100GB/s? :O That's just bananas. External bandwidth is really picking up.
Can't wait to see what GPU is gonna accompany this monster. With that much bandwidth, they better not fuck up again like they did with the GIF bus. PEACE.CrimsonSkies
Member
"It also will not carry the same technical baggage that has made most of today's computers compatible with older PCs. That architectural divergence will challenge the current dominant paradigm of computing that Microsoft and Intel have fostered."
Exactly why Microsoft got into gaming. Billions and Billions of reasons in the bank for both Intel and Microsoft to torpedo the Cell Chip from dethroning the x486. But maybe this is the one that does it. Who knows.
Exactly why Microsoft got into gaming. Billions and Billions of reasons in the bank for both Intel and Microsoft to torpedo the Cell Chip from dethroning the x486. But maybe this is the one that does it. Who knows.
Duckhuntdog
Member
Pimpwerx said:That's nothing really. The beauty of the architecture lies in its scalability and software hierarchy. The power gains are made to come from stacking PEs. So some of the fud from today is that the PS3 will probably see 2 of these cores (PEs) in its CPU. That would be pretty badass IMO. But we'll see how they solve the powerhandling problems. People wigged out at the 85C temp, but I thought that was without a fan. I assume there was a heatsink, or something like it though. We'll see.
Oh yeah, Rambus gets a lot of stick for a company that's still developing great new products. 100GB/s? :O That's just bananas. External bandwidth is really picking up.
Granted the beauty of the Cell in scalability and such, but this pretty much ends the CPU battle between PS3, Xenon, and Rev. Although I am not a code monkey, no offense to coders.
Intel should be worried if IBM can get this into the high to mid end server range.
Huh? Intel doesn't work for MS anymore, and Microsoft can prevent other chips from becoming mainstream by refusing to write software for them (they don't need their own console). Though I'm not sure what they would really have to gain by murdering an x86 competitor.....CrimsonSkies said:
CrimsonSkies said:
Cell won't torpedo Intel/AMD, at least not in the PC market. It's aimed at consumer devices, supercomputers, workstations, embedded devices etc. and threatens Intel/AMD insofar as they currently enjoy business in these spaces too.
Also, I wouldn't expect more than 1 PE in PS3. That's enough imo, and 2 PEs would be an exceptionally tight squeeze.
From SCE press material quoted earlier:
So we really don't know yet if the Cell embodiment unveiled today is the one for use in the PS3, right? Where everyone seems to be focusing on the question of how many PEs the PS3 will have have it could also be question of how many SPUs are in each PE.
Pug said:
IF using 90nm, you mean?
That aside, agreed. 1PE, 8APUs is entirely feasible though, when you look at the die size (it's actually a little smaller than the EE originally was). I wouldn't worry about them cutting APUs from it for PS3 (after the info today, I'd be shocked).
CrimsonSkies
Member
"Huh? Intel doesn't work for MS anymore"
I'm not exactly sure who you are trying to tell this too. You quoted me, but isn't that fairly obvious to everyone. I was referencing the article that linked Intel and Microsoft together in a world that doesn't only involve gaming.
I'm not exactly sure who you are trying to tell this too. You quoted me, but isn't that fairly obvious to everyone. I was referencing the article that linked Intel and Microsoft together in a world that doesn't only involve gaming.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Did the SCEE paper mention SMT for the PU as well as VMX ?
I think I read just that...
The core is also OOOe (easier to build SMT on top of a OOOe processor core), has 2 nice layers of cache and a VMX unit: this is quite FAST.
I think I read just that...
The core is also OOOe (easier to build SMT on top of a OOOe processor core), has 2 nice layers of cache and a VMX unit: this is quite FAST.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Phoenix said:And an absurdity in overkill considering that the CELL is secondary to the nVidia hardware for rendering. Having an uber CPU that so overpowers the GPU would just be wasteful IMO. Like putting a P4 in a machine with a Rage128 video card
Uhm... I disagree, it is much worse to have a good CPU paired with a super-super GPU than the opoosite: rendering is not all you do
.Open source tools...open source support
It's going to be a repeat of this gen in terms of Japanese developers being the only ones to actually take advantage of Sony's architectural preferences
The next generation will not be fought with hardware. Microsoft knows it's all about the games. Sony is at this point in danger of losing sight of that, as they are more of a hardware company than Microsoft you know, and have a very vested interest in seeing their entertainment business stay alive and kicking by continuing to make every living breathing Japanese person spend their nickels and dimes on anything with the word Sony on it.
CELL is a monster, but the *PS3* at this point is looking like it's going to be less feature rich than Xenon and only a *little* more powerful (and pretty much worthless to try to extract that power unless you're Square and especially because everything is going to be Xenon first and middleware'd to PS3). Microsoft has the bang for the buck equation to the T.
It's going to be a repeat of this gen in terms of Japanese developers being the only ones to actually take advantage of Sony's architectural preferences
The next generation will not be fought with hardware. Microsoft knows it's all about the games. Sony is at this point in danger of losing sight of that, as they are more of a hardware company than Microsoft you know, and have a very vested interest in seeing their entertainment business stay alive and kicking by continuing to make every living breathing Japanese person spend their nickels and dimes on anything with the word Sony on it.
CELL is a monster, but the *PS3* at this point is looking like it's going to be less feature rich than Xenon and only a *little* more powerful (and pretty much worthless to try to extract that power unless you're Square and especially because everything is going to be Xenon first and middleware'd to PS3). Microsoft has the bang for the buck equation to the T.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Vortac said:
????
sonycowboy
Member
Vortac said:
:lol :lol
How is that? The only Xenon "features" being written about are the ones possibly being CUT OUT. No high definition media, no backwards compatibility, no hard drive, most likely no "out-of-the-box" DVD playing (again). PS3 will most likely offer all of the above except for the hard drive. What is it that makes Xenon more "feature rich"?Vortac said:
A "little" more powerful seems a bit premature, given that nothing solid is known about PS3 GPU, or Xenon CPU/GPU.
Very impressive.
PC gaming is going to take a while to catch up because it'll have to transistion to multicore, 64-bit processors. All PS3s have it so all games should immediately take advantage of it. But PCs will need so much software redone if x86 is aborted.
PC gaming is going to take a while to catch up because it'll have to transistion to multicore, 64-bit processors. All PS3s have it so all games should immediately take advantage of it. But PCs will need so much software redone if x86 is aborted.
Jim Kahle, IBM director of technology for Cell technology, holds up a new Cell chip during a news conference in San Francisco Monday.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6929471/
You do realize this is next generation RAMBUS? Runs at 6.4 GHz for PS3, I think. Compared to the fastest Windows PC RAM...*effective 1066 MHz* from dual channel in Intel's EE processors. However, dual channel's effectiveness isn't as complete as a single channel at the same frequency.
Latency isn't that big of an issue, at least for PC gaming. The difference between 2-2-2-5 timings and 4-4-4-8 with DDR RAM is like 2%...yet people spend $100+ for it...just crazy.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
rastex said:
This does not mean you won't be able to use Visual Studio.NET IDE to compile on PlayStation 3 dev kits also I doubt all nVIDIA tools will be open-sourced
.Still, not eveything open-source is worse than profesionally developed... Firefox, SeaMonkey, etc... compared to the likes of IE
. Yeah, yeah... ONLY one instance... yeah... yeah...The fact that they will be open-sourced does not mean that IBM, SCE/Sony and Toshiba will not do the bulk of development for quite a while.
You must have gotten Mr. Gates' e-mail too
hehe.Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
rastex said:Considering MS owns Xbox and VS, the integration is far nicer. ProDG is pretty good though, but it's not open source
And let's just say Sony libs don't have the greatest of reputations...
I know the reputation they have, but still IBM's and nVIDIA's tools and libraries seems to have better reputations, plus I think that relying on graphical APIs such as OpenGL ES 2.0 will be more helpful for developers starting on the system: not everyone will start at the low level.
DonasaurusRex
Online Ho Champ
The cool thing i heard about CELL is that it will be able to run Linux, so there IS a threat to Intel/MS/AMD. Unfortunately its all about software and x86 has tons and tons of it which makes me believe that MS will have to break or APPLE will have to get with it for CELL to actually make it in the desktop world. It WILL be cheap cause it will be produced in such vast volumes for the PS3 and other devices. Then again the x86 has owned superior architectures before, like Alpha, MIPS , and the Power PC architecture. The great thing is the CELL doesnt have to be pushed into the market anytimes soon, with it being in the console, and media devices it will support itself for a long time. IBM is also in the perfect market for Cell, servers, and if they can get it running linux or something the mid to high end server range is gonna get shaken up. The interesting thing is that you could feasibly put a PCIe card with a cell chip on it and use it as a general co processor tee hee. Some people are saying that the CELL wont perform very well in serial applications due to the lack of main memory access. We'll see. No matter who loses we win , i think processing power for the masses is about it explode.
Panajev2001a said:This does not mean you won't be able to use Visual Studio.NET IDE to compile on PlayStation 3 dev kits also I doubt all nVIDIA tools will be open-sourced
There's quite a big difference between a compiler... and development tools and documentation.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
DopeyFish said:
The IDE is more than the compiler, which would not be MS's compiler of course.
The IDE is one of the development tools and if you say that it does not matter, wlel go back to using gvim wile I will go back to use Visual Studio.NET 2003 to do my PlayStation 2 Linux coding.
I am a bit less worried about the compiler, the quality of the other development tools and the documentation: might it be that having IBM helps SCE/Sony and Toshiba in the job of producing nice PlayStation 3 SDK's ?
I thought he was talking about system feature sets - at least that's what it sounded like.
Anyway, we'll see how things turn out with devtools, it was a reference to CPU tools only - from comments there it seems likely the default dev environment will be Eclipse, which while open source doesn't exactly have a bad reputation among developers.
Compilers - well that remains to be seen.
Panajev2001a said:
IBM will provide the compiler for sure, and they have a lot of experience in that field so it should be pretty nice. In terms of tools and libraries, I doubt nVidia will contribute anything outside the GPU realm which will be pretty standard anyway. The big question mark goes to how much support IBM will provide game devs with game specific knowledge and examples.
But really, none of this stuff is too important as only a minor subset of game programmers will ever deal with any of these things. It's only the low-level rendering guys, and the leads that do the optimizations that'll really care about these specifics. For the most part, studios are migrating to middleware platforms (Renderware, Unreal, Source?, XNA?) so it's not going to be a question of which platform to develop for, but which middleware.
You'll still see first parties and some 3rd party exclusive studios take advantage of the hardware and really push the enveloppe, but 90% of games released will look pretty similar across the board, unless there's a large difference in main memory.
Duckhuntdog
Member
Vortac said:
It speaks, yet human is not??
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
I think nVIDIA will provide Cg, an OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant profile and all the tools they offer (as well as the support) to PC developers: I also think they might open up a few more details on hte GPU's hardware even though ... well you must have heard it too.
That's all very subjective too though - there's plenty of people who will swear that VS/.NET is a steaming turd not to be touched with 10 foot pole. And there's others who will say the exact same thing for ProDG, or CodeWarior for that matter.rastex said:Considering MS owns Xbox and VS, the integration is far nicer. ProDG is pretty good though, but it's not open source
And let's just say Sony libs don't have the greatest of reputations...
Anyway, I'll mirror Panas thoughts about compilers.
I am not worried about documentation on CPU side - both IBM and Sony have excellent track record in that respect from my experience.
I DO worry about documentation for the GPU side however - I know some people might tell me that explicit low level knowledge of GPU details is unnecessary fluff, but I very much disagree about that when it comes to a closed platform.