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IBM Adds Videogame Console Chips to Mainframes
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 26, 2007 01:48 PM
from the this-story-has-about-everything-i-love-in-it dept.
from the this-story-has-about-everything-i-love-in-it dept.
GoIBMPS3 writes "Soon the powerful 'Cell' microprocessor that fuels Sony's PlayStation 3 console will be available in IBM mainframe computers. The intent is to allow high-performance machines to run complex online games and virtual worlds. 'The integration initially will be accomplished by networking the mainframe with IBM's Cell blades, but eventually the Cells will be plugged more directly into the mainframes via PCI adapter cards, IBM said. It's the latest twist in IBM's years-long effort to keep mainframes not only relevant but also cutting-edge. IBM is touting the partnership as an example of hybrid computing--a trend sweeping the high-performance computing industry as companies augment general-purpose servers with special-purpose chips that to accelerate particular tasks.'"
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Also in the works: (Score:5, Funny)
However the prototype was destroyed in a freak bowling/mountain dew/pizza accident.
A number of BOFH episodes come to mind (Score:4, Interesting)
PCI? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:PCI? (Score:4, Informative)
Flying Cars! (Score:5, Funny)
And it will be as powerful as today's most advanced videogames...
Makes quite a bit of sense to me (Score:4, Insightful)
And the Cell isn't really intended for general-purpose use - it's far more appropriate to use it in a system where the code has been written and designed specifically for it.
What better market than one which is composed almost entirely of people with reasonably specific, defined needs?
Re:Makes quite a bit of sense to me (Score:5, Funny)
That's ok - the PS3 designers didn't devote much memory to the Cell processors either.
mainframs are perfect for MMORPGs (Score:3, Insightful)
Really high performance
Easily scalable,
and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.
To try and replicate those efforts on PC servers is a waste of money.
Properly done, those issues that arise in many MMORPGs when a large percentage of their population goes to on area for an event....Blizzard I'm looking at you.
Re:mainframs are perfect for MMORPGs (Score:5, Insightful)
Really high performance
Easily scalable,
and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.
Don't forget these added bonuses:
So expensive you could buy an entire data center's worth of x86 servers instead of leasing a single mainframe for a year.
Requires members of the dwindling cult of mainframe experts to administer.
For sale on Ebay (Score:5, Funny)
Pay for shipping and I'll send you the punch cards.
Networks Ground to a Halt! (Score:4, Funny)
More news at 11.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(Come to
Cell is not a "Console Chip" (Score:4, Interesting)
The Cell is no more a console chip than the x86 (used in XBox) or the PowerPC (used in the 360). Yes, it is used in a console, but I hate to see such a powerful chip "type-cast" to the console. I'm glad IBM is cutting the Cell loose by actually using it for something other than console gaming. However, I wish they would have used a better example than "Virtual Worlds" for its uses. Something like Medical Imaging, 3D Rendering or even Weather Forecasting would have been so much better towards breaking the Cell from its gaming niche.
CELL isn't a video game processor! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, while the CELL is inspired by GPU design, I think it would be more appropriate to say that CELL is a supercomputing architecture that, being what it is, is also highly suitable for graphics applications. As such, I think what the slashdot article says is silly. What IBM is doing is putting a supercomputing architecture into a mainframe. This isn't weird. It's sensible and a wise move, technically and competitively.
Re:CELL isn't a video game processor! (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I don't think I'd use the word "supercomputing" to describe the distributed signal processing for which GPUs are now being used. GPUs won't be used on "real" supercomputers until they decide to implement proper 64-bit IEEE 754 (floating point) support. In that sense, the Cell is more immediately useful for HPC, and along with IBMs presence in that area, you'll see a supercomputer using Cell chips first.
Cool... (Score:4, Funny)
(Actually, that's all bullshit. Don't play games, never been to a LAN party, don't know where to find one. But that's never stopped posting here before.)
The Cell Isn't a "Game Chip" (Score:5, Informative)
The Cell has never been intended solely to be a "game chip." It was always intended to be useful in large supercomputer type environments.
The Folding At Home client is an example of a large clustered-based application that uses the Cell as a math processor, as is the recent "real-time raytracing" demo. Both are applications of the Cell in a "mainframe" type environment.
So it's not surprising that IBM would be releasing Cell-based machines - that's been the plan all along. It was never intended just to be used in the PS3.
PCI Card with a Cell (Score:3, Interesting)
I would think there would be a healthy market for a 'cell accelerator card', especially in the world I come from (Modeling and Simulation)...
Re:PCI Card with a Cell (Score:4, Interesting)
The best hobbyist platform is definitely the PS3. Linux runs great on it and HDMI->DVI adaptors let you use it with a DVI monitor (we run them at 1920x1600 on Dell 24" LCDs). As long as PS3s are in the $500-600 price range, there's no real incentive for another low-cost Cell platform. Of course, access to the graphics pipeline is limited, but the SPUs are much easier to program and more flexible than GPUs for general purpose computation.
If you do bite the bullet and go with a PS3, we've developed a Python library -- CorePy [corepy.org] -- for programming the SPUs (and PPU) directly. It replaces assembly/intrinsics with Python function calls and provides components for building and optimzing SPU programs. It takes the sting out of using the C-based tools and gives you more flexibility with how you use the SPUs.
-Chris
Mostly for streaming data, not gaming. (Score:3, Informative)
IBM has been talking this up for a while. The idea is to offload some "streaming stuff" onto the Cell processors. The phrase "XML acceleration" has been used [ibm.com], which probably means the Cell gets the job of taking some DB2 result and pumping it out in XML. It's also useful for SSL encryption and other related streaming-type tasks.
This is a traditional IBM transaction processing approach. The mainframe is surrounded by lesser machines which handle the communications and formatting, extract the transaction which needs access to the data, ships that to the mainframe, gets a result back, and then formats a reply to the requestor. In the green-screen terminal era, that was done by dedicated hardware. In the web era, too much of that work moved onto the mainframe itself.
Think of this usage of the Cell as offloading the front half of Apache to peripheral processors. When your AJAX app makes an XMLHttpRequest, the idea is that the front-end machines get the request, decode it, wait until it's complete, then pass one single transaction to the mainframe. A single reply comes back, is reformatted as XML, and is shipped out to the client. The number of events processed by the mainframe goes way down, and all the protocol work is offloaded to the low-cost Cell machines with tiny memories.
Has nothing to do with gaming, though. They're not putting the PS3's GPU (from NVidia) on mainframes.
Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though. That's too small. Just cramming the whole protocol stack in there will fill most of the memory. I think this thing will really start to fly when IBM gets up to a 2-4MB per Cell CPU. Then you'll be able to fit the front-end processing for a web server in the Cell. Until then, it's a niche product.
Finally! (Score:4, Funny)
Sweeping New Trend (Score:3, Insightful)
As I recall my 286 had a Math Coprocessor.
Years later I bought a hardware MPEG decoder card so that I could watch DVD's without skipping on my old Pentium ii.
And over the last several years I've installed GPU boards to accelerate some particular video rendering tasks.
Its nice to see the idea of special purpose chips for hardware acceleration is finally catching on in high performance computing.
Where is? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, here it is.
Try reading the synopsis (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:this is irrelevant. (Score:5, Informative)
An AS/400 is a midrange, not a mainframe. Despite having a large span of scalability, the AS/400 only overlaps the bottom end of the mainframe in performance.
Also, the reasons people buy AS/400's and mainframes are as follows:
Extremely high reliability and security
Performance and scalability
Protection of software investment
justify scrapping for something modern
Do you realize that the AS400 hardware and operating system is more "modern" than Unix? Did you realize that the as400 hardware and operating system have key features that other OS's lack today but most people are moving that direction? Do some research on security and the as400, for example.
the AS/400 or iSeries as it's been renamed, could be replaced in a heartbeat by a LAMP server with an AJAX frontend for 1% of the cost.
Have you ever seen an AS/400 that required even an operator? High end, sure, but small to medium business the controller puts in the backup tape and that's about it. Hardware/software, you're right, but unless you include support salaries then you are comparing apples to oranges, although you could make the exact same argument about Sun/Oracle being more expensive than LAMP.