Cell CPU

[MBX]

i've read many things about the cell-cpu (featured in ps3 for example) and it's power. a professor at a university is using 8 ps3's to calculate black holes (and the clustered cell cpu power is equivalent to 200 cpu's of a supercomputer he previously had to use he said).

and it seems that intel is still a year or two away to get on par with the cell.

however i don't quite understand ibm. why didn't they put the cell-cpu in workstations? ps3 sell for around $400, it's not like it's too expensive.
i heard they're starting or started to put cell's into blade servers, but why not in workstations? it seems like they'd have huge advantage over intel's core2/4/ franchise.

is it because of software compatibility? linux definately runs on it. and i've seen linux demo's on ps3 with all possible apps running, so it seems it's all fine.

it seems rather disappointing that such a great cpu-brand like the cell didn't make it into more useful distribution other than gaming, no?

 

[FF_productions]

I don't think they have taken advantage of the power of a Cell CPU yet.

I've heard that it's about as powerful as a 1.6 ghz G5 (I think that's without optimization.)

 

[MBX]

I've heard that it's about as powerful as a 1.6 ghz G5 (I think that's without optimization.)

are you sure? i "heard" the opposite, it actually being more something like a 8-core intel at 6ghz.

 

[FF_productions]

are you sure? i "heard" the opposite, it actually being more something like a 8-core intel at 6ghz.

With optimization, I don't think it would be that fast. But, I'm sure there's some serious power under the hood of the PS3.

 

[Schtumple]

With optimization, I don't think it would be that fast. But, I'm sure there's some serious power under the hood of the PS3.

2nded

Without the right optimization the cell processor is nothing special...

But with it, its a motherload of a powerhouse.

 

[Eidorian]

I don't think they have taken advantage of the power of a Cell CPU yet.

I've heard that it's about as powerful as a 1.6 ghz G5 (I think that's without optimization.)

I remember these benchmarks as well.

are you sure? i "heard" the opposite, it actually being more something like a 8-core intel at 6ghz.

lol wut?

 

[MBX]

I remember these benchmarks as well.

lol wut?

an example: http://www.cell-processor.net/news.php

"Cell achieved up to 27 times faster performance in image processing compared to Intel Core2Duo 2.4GHz."

 

[Super Macho Man]

The Cell is very fast at particular tasks. At ordinary desktop PC tasks it is nothing special and even quite a bit slower than an ordinary Intel chip. It's designed to be the perfect game console processor, and there is a reason it has shown up only in a game console to this point.

It's basically the Altivec concept taken to the extreme. Like Altivec, it only works well with highly tuned single-precision floating-point code. Integer and double-precision FP performance are very poor, and those are primarily what desktop computers use most.

Merry Christmas!

 

[Super Macho Man]

an example: http://www.cell-processor.net/news.php

"Cell achieved up to 27 times faster performance in image processing compared to Intel Core2Duo 2.4GHz."

You would be better off comparing the Cell to the GPU inside that C2D computer, because the Cell and the C2D are totally different chips intended for different purposes. The C2D is a far better general-purpose desktop processor. There is a reason most 3D graphics code is executed on the GPU while most program code is executed on the CPU - different code is best handled by different chips designed to optimize the performance of that code.

Merry Christmas!

 

[Masquerade]

however i don't quite understand ibm. why didn't they put the cell-cpu in workstations? ps3 sell for around $400, it's not like it's too expensive.
i heard they're starting or started to put cell's into blade servers, but why not in workstations? it seems like they'd have huge advantage over intel's core2/4/ franchise

.........

it seems rather disappointing that such a great cpu-brand like the cell didn't make it into more useful distribution other than gaming, no?

these processor are good because they starve for a huge amount of data. you can feed these with motion graphics or real audio and apply matrix transformations - that's the common use. its oriented architecture makes difficult to programm ordinary applications into it.

 

[zap2]

are you sure? i "heard" the opposite, it actually being more something like a 8-core intel at 6ghz.

Nope...atleast for current Linux distros...now Sony could do more with that...but we don't really know how much more(minus the fact that it is alot, based on folding@home numbers)