The Mystery of Cell Processors

LucidBeast writes "Consumer appliances requiring more computing power Sony, IBM and Toshiba started 2001 developing "Cell"-processor that comprises of multiple processor cores and should give performance ten times of conventional processors. Now the CNN Money reports that details of the processor will be released Feb. 6-10 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. Also reported by EE Times. Rumors also tell that Sonys PS3 development platform has already been shipped to some developers equipped with the cell processor."

Article text

Chip power, times 10
Sony, IBM, Toshiba disclose details of new processor that will run next-generation electronics.
November 29, 2004: 6:13 AM EST

TOKYO (Reuters) - IBM, Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. on Monday unveiled some key details on the powerful new "Cell" processor the three are jointly producing to run next-generation computers, game consoles and TVs.

Cloaked in secrecy and the object of much speculation since the three conglomerates announced the project in 2001, Cell will be 10 times more powerful than conventional chips and able to shepherd large chunks of data over broadband networks.

In a joint release, the three firms gave a glimpse of their respective plans for Cell-powered products, but were mum on technical details, which will be revealed Feb. 6-10 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

IBM (Research), Sony (Research) and Toshiba are investing billions of dollars to develop and prepare for mass production of Cell, which is a multicore semiconductor composed of several processors that work together to handle multiple tasks at the same time.

"In the future, all forms of digital content will be converged and fused onto the broadband network," Ken Kutaragi, executive deputy president and COO of Sony, said in the release. "Current PC architecture is nearing its limits."

IBM said it would start pilot production of the microprocessor at its plant in East Fishkill, N.Y., in the first half of 2005. It will use advanced 300 millimeter silicon wafers, which yield more chips per wafer than the 200 mm kind.

It also announced plans to first use the chip in a workstation it is developing with Sony, targeting the digital content and entertainment industries.

Sony said it would launch home servers and high-definition televisions powered by Cell in 2006, and reiterated plans to use the microchip to power the next-generation PlayStation game console, a working version of which will be unveiled in May.

Toshiba said it planned to launch a high-definition TV using Cell in 2006. Top of page

Re:Article text

"In the future, all forms of digital content will be converged and fused onto the broadband network"

And all restaurants will be Taco Bell...

Re:End Result May Disappoint

I think Sony also has some expertise in the console market, afterall they do have two of the best selling consoles ever. And of course they are the current king of the console market, so I would think that should stand for somthing as far as "expertise" goes.

But yes, we will likely be underimpressed with the PS3 when it comes out. But all of the "non geeks" out there who never heard the five versions of the inflated specs that we were promised will still love the machine for what it is, a good game console.

So it won't ever have the most teraflops on the worlds' supercomputer list...who cares?

Re:End Result May Disappoint

"When PS2 was launched, incredible specs were also touted; on delivery it ended up cheaper but not more powerful than a high-spec PC with a good video card one year later. I am afraid we might end up with another mediocre product at a reasonable price point."

Frankly I like the idea of delivering power comparable to a high-end PC in a less expensive console. Those that want the most possible power will pay the price for the PC anyway so they can keep it updated. The console buyer wants simplicity and low price. As a reformed geek myself I never want to touch the guts of a computer again. My two favorite electronic devices are my iMac and iPod. When I buy another game console I will be much more concerned with the quality of the games and the ease of use than the raw specs. I'd certainly like to see what all this power could deliver, but I'd rather it be US$199 than "incredible."

Re:End Result May Disappoint

As a reformed geek myself I never want to touch the guts of a computer again.

You're in the wrong place.

Please Help!

"Consumer appliances requiring more computing power Sony, IBM and Toshiba started 2001 developing "Cell"-processor that comprises of multiple processor cores and should give performance ten times of conventional processors."

What in the hell does that sentence mean? I can handle a couple of spelling or grammatical problems, but seriously! What the fuck does that mean? Are 3 companies working together to create this Cell processor, or are there three different Cell processors...

Re:Please Help!

I've seen a quote saying that once we get a natural language compiler, we'll find that geeks can't write.

Re:Please Help!

I always find it odd that so many "Nerds", people who spend their time programming in languages that demand incredibly exact syntax, can't get basic "natural language" syntax right.

We can. The problem arises in that other people cannot (or rather, do not, since most adults can form grammatically correct sentences if you force them to).

Another, humorous, response to the parent post nicely illustrates the problem... The only way to parse it such that it remains (almost) grammatically correct runs along the lines of "three consumer appliances named Sony, IBM and Toshiba that are inneed of more computing power".

Now, you can say that any human reader would get the correct meaning. And in this situation, I'll grant that as most likely true. But if people use sloppy grammar in "obvious" sentences, they most likely will carry that into more subtle sentences as well.

So when a geek chides someone for misuse of a natural language, insisting on an exactness bordering on formal logic - They/We do so because it improves comprehension.

A non-geek might feel comfortable trying to divine a sloppy author's intended meaning. But we realize the consequences... Do that in a programming language, and at best you'll get buggy code. Do that in real life, and you get ambiguities such as (no political commentary intended) whether or not Bush said/implied a link exists between Saddam and Osama.

Well..

multiple processor cores and should give performance ten times of conventional processors.

About 10 processor cores, right?

They should have enough power to divide by zero by now, right? or is that still to "difficult"

What they didn't mention

details of the processor will be released Feb. 6-10

it gives a 10 times performance gain over a normal processor, from the year 2001 of course, which will be something like a 1.3 GHz P4 or a 800 MHz Celeron, both introduced in january 2001 ;-)

What language do they use?

These multi core and multi processor systems can be a bugger to program for because handling concurrrency in a way that doesnt cause deadlocking is a major pain in the ass.

One of the better ways is to model out the program in CSP (or a variant thereof) and then write in a specially designed language like Occam (developed for the original transputer, but ported now to x86). These give you code that cannot deadlock or livelock or suffer from resource starvation without needing any of the complex and buggy hacks you see in things like the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel only has to deal with a few processors... scalling to a few thousand processors in C would require a programmer of insane genius or the implimentation of effectivly a new language on top of C to handle the problems caused.

So, what language do developers use to target this? Is it something elegant designed for the problem at hand?

Small problem

There's only one small problem with your contention - Linux /does/ scale out to at least 512 processors - hardly 'a few' - and is heading up to multiple thousands with SGI's current work.

Of course, one could argue that the Linux folks have more than one insane genius among them...

Re:What language do they use?

Linux Insider is running a couple of editorials speculating [linuxinsider.com] about running Linux [linuxinsider.com] on the 'Cell' processor. The bold prediction? 'the Linux developer community will, virtually en masse, abandon the x86 in favor of the new machine.'

Playstation3 vs. XBox2

Sounds like Playstation3 vs. XBox2 will look like a battle between a Terminator T1000 and Clippy.

Re:Playstation3 vs. XBox2

XBox2: PowerPC-based CPU made by IBM.

PS3: POWER-based CPU made by IBM.

Looks like a good time to own IBM stock...

A bit more on PS3

But UNC's Zimmons has his doubts. "I believe that while theoretically having a large number of transistors enables teraflops-class performance, the PS3 [Playstation 3] will not be able to deliver this kind of power to the consumer," quoted from /. referenced article.

Zimmons talks the details [pcvsconsole.com].

Will be interesting...

I currently work at a game studio here in Melbourne Australia and we're looking at next gen stuff (currently we develop xbox, ps2, PC games). Anyway, today at a meeting, one of the senior developers told our group that 4 had been selected to go to a little show and tell by IBM/Sony in Melbourne, where some of the secrets of the "Cell" processor would be demonstrated/explained to the group. Apparently we were only able to get 4 spots at this event.

So I'm exicited looks like the tech in just around the corner and so are the multi-core platforms (like XBOX2 and PS3).... yay!

Why does a game console need such a monster CPU?

I don't think that a game console needs such a so sophisticated and so powerful CPU, for important reasons:

-Real-time 3d graphics of cinematic quality will always be too slow for general purpose CPUs.

-developing a game with AI that needs ten times the power of todays CPUs will take many man years and may not be that welcomed by the console audience.

-It's very difficult to do multithreaded apps, and the difficulty rises exponentially with the number of threads.

So what exactly would the be role of the CELL processor in PS3?

It would make much more sense if:

-Sony developed a platform that can move insanely great amount of graphics around, with the ability to do real-time raytracing, rather than providing so much general-purpose processing power.

-Sony developed a graphics architecture that could really be parallelised, so instead of bringing out a totally new console, they could just up the graphics spec by adding more chips. They could save millions of dollars from developing and advertising the new console.

Believe the hype!!!

The Cell processor is going to rule!

After all, look how accurate Sony's hype about the PS2 was:

The PS2 will be able to render 75 million lit, shaded polygons per second!

The PS2 will be able to run games at HDTV resolution (1280x960) out of the box with no performance loss!

We will build professional workstations out of 32 Emotion Engine chips which will be able to render movies in realtime and take over the professional graphics industry!

Since all the hype turned out to be completely 100% accurate, I'm sure we can expect the same for the PS3 / Cell Processor.

I suppose it's also possible that it will be another massively over-hyped disappointment with builtin Sony patented lameness that sucks even harder than ATRAC. But you'd have to be a real fucking cynic to believe that!

Intel Prescott vs. Motorola 68k

This does not surprise me in the least. A Prescott processor has 125 million transistors, a Motorola 68000 had 68000 transistors. Yet the Prescott is not 1838 times more productive on a per clock-cycle basis. Admittedly, some of those Prescott transistors go to cache, superscalar magic, creating long fast pipes to achieve the GHz and implementing nifty MMX features. Even so, fabbing a 68k in 90 nm would create a tight little processor that is not 1800 times slower than the Prescott.

Thus, one can imagine creating a tighter core processor design with a budget of a million transistors each (15 times the original 68k budget) with a few million for L1 cache and another million for glue and then place 20 of them on a single die. Add optical interconnects and that new optical-to-silicon technology invented recently (for multiple channels of GHz I/O to feed all those cores) and you have yourself a powerful little processor.

The point is that with a budget of 125 million transistors, designers can do more than create a bloated single-core CISC processor.

Basicly, it is marketspeak...

...the current computer architecture is nearing its limits yes, but it has no relationship to the content. A modern processor is very well capable of decoding HDTV content, probably encode too if you can accept less than super compression.

Of course, I see where it is going, I assume these Cell chips will be used to control hardware encoders/decoders with hard real-time limits (i.e. no frame skips and such crap). Taking the best of "dumb" hardware players of today, combined with the multitasking and flexibility of general computers.

But it is still a computer in drag. If anything, this seems more like a "retro" trend of the past, when you had active NICs/HDD controllers/whatnot with processors of their own. Now it is back with Cells instead. Just like terminals, we're coming full circle.

Kjella

Re:And this article tells us WHAT?!!

The article on El Reg [theregister.com] has a bit more information content. The chip is POWER-based, and supports multiple cores, each of which can run a separate OS. This is the first POWER chip to be produced in volume (I'm not counting workstation / server chips as volume). This, combined with the PowerPC-based XBox2 may mean that the unit cost of POWER/PowerPC chips drops enough to make beige-box POWER/PowerPC systems cheap enough to be a viable alternative to x86.

past.

or take a look at the 2002 patent application:

http://theinquirer.net/?article=19941

Re:Cell in TV ?

IBM is planning to market many different types of Cell CPU's for handys, TV's, Workstations, and and Super Computers.

DRM For the Masses

After reading that press release, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure what's really "new" about the Cell other than On-chip hardware in support of security system for intellectual property protection. There are other Power designs already that do multicore, do high performance, and do vector ops(Altivect), so the only thing that I haven't heard about a design for is their security system.

Considering the companies involved, and the devices that they want to put the chip in, I'm really tempted to say that the Cell is nothing more than the biggest effort we've ever seen to get a DRM (trusted computing) CPU and associated parts on to the market. Obviously, this scares the bejesus out of me, since it would mean that these Cell devices would effectively be mod-proof; systems like Xbox Live already keep cheaters away, so this seems to be an attempt to stop modding alltogether. So, I have to ask: how is this going to benefit me, the consumer? If Live already gets rid of possible cheaters, how does stopping me from modding my box altogether help me?

If these assumptions are right, I don't like where this is going.