Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (
More info?)
Felger Carbon <fmsfnf@jfoops.net> wrote:
> "Robert Myers" <rmyers1400@comcast.net> wrote in message
> news:ccno21tfapf5f71b54qnsrg6nc0gehaquk@4ax.com...
> >
> > Regardless of what Myerson thinks, people will be looking at Cell's
> > ~28 gigaflop double precision floating point performance, and
> > generally not for image processing.
> I could point out that the Cell is simply the second iteration of
> Sony's PS1 "Emotion Engine", which was predicted when announced to
> take over the world. But I won't, because that's irrelevant.
PS1 is a MIPS processor based machine. "Emotion Engine" went into
PS2. There's a MIPS processor that normally handles I/O for the
PS2, "Emotion engine" was supposed to take over the world. I was
at Hotchips when Sony came out and did the demo there. Very cool
to see the duck swimming around the bath tub in real time rendering
with the level of detail that it had (very cool for that era).
CELL will go into PS3.
> What's relevant is that there is no software to make use of Cell, and
> there never will be, except for PS2 games. Thus, the question of
> whether there are other architectural deficiencies are irrelevant.
I'm not sure about the "there'll never be" part. The question is,
"If you build it, will they come?"
The CELL architecture is intriguing enough that I'm sure it'll
get some looks. Whether those looks turn into serious development
work some 3~5 years down the road is yet unknown, since STI is
still mum on the programming model and software stack that they
are willing to provide to developers.
> A beast like the Cell is veddy hard to program. Not something to
> program in C. Or Cobol. Or Fortran. Or Algol. Hundreds or
> thousands of megabytes of assembly code, anyone? ;-)
I think Sony learned quite a bit from the experience of the EE.
Developers complained quite loudly about moving data in and out
of EE's tiny on-chip memory, and the fact that they had to hand
code a lot of stuff to get the promised performance was unattractive
also. However, as the PS2 platform matured, developers got better
at extracting the performance out of the same platform, and games
got better in terms of details. CELL architecture's learning curve
will likely be slightly less steep because of EE's learning
experience. Not going to be nearly as easy as just write C code
and throw it to the compiler, but we'll see where that goes.
(And the SPE's "local memory" is considerably larger than EE's)
--
davewang202(at)yahoo(dot)com
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