Squall 9
10-02-2005, 12:03 AM
السلام عليكم :
معلومات بالإنجليزي عن سوني3 :
PS3 Power: Details on Cell
February 7, 2005 - Sony Computer Entertainment, IBM and Toshiba held a press conference in downtown San Francisco this morning to unveil more details on their collaborative Cell processor. While there are still a few details and bits of information that the three companies are keeping mum about for the moment, they did reveal and confirm plenty of specs that had been only rumors and guesses for some time now.
For those of you who like reading numbers more than words, here are some raw specs (which we'll discuss below):
Each Cell processor contains 8 Synergistic Processing Units and a single 64-bit Power Architecture Unit (All are RISC designs with SIMD)
Operates at >4GHz and capable of >256GFLOPS
256KB Local Storage per SPU and 512KB L2 Cache (2.5MB total)
128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor
High-speed internal element interconnect performing at 96B/cycle
234 million transistors
Prototype die size of 221mm^2
Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology
Backtracking for just a second to cover those who haven't been following recent events (for example, we've put a man on the moon), the Cell microprocessor is a multi-core processor that's designed to handle a large number of tasks simultaneously. The first known major use of the Cell processor will be Sony's next-generation gaming machine, which we'll refer to as PlayStation 3 for the time being (Sony has yet to announce its official name, but you can bet on PS3).
While there wasn't any mention of PlayStation 3 at the press conference per-se, you can assume that the following specs will be very close to what will be going into the system. While Cell is being called a "supercomputer on a chip", NVIDIA will actually be providing the GPU in Sony's next system, which you can read more about here. Knowing that, if Cell is anywhere near as fast as what the rumors and these specs say, we'll have our hands on an extremely fast console by the end of 2006 (if the rumored release time stands true)..
http://gearmedia.ign.com/gear/image/article/585/585862/details-on-cell-20050207005224717-000.jpg
.For the record, a wafer was actually shown at the press conference, proving that processors are actually coming off the line. It's good to know this thing actually exists.
A "specific" Cell processor was discussed at the conference. By "specific" we mean a certain design, though not necessarily clock speed. Cell is designed to be a scalable processor, meaning that more or fewer cores could be built into a single Cell processor. The following specs are based on the processor design that was discussed at the conference. Workstations, servers or other applications built with more cores could theoretically be many times faster.
The Cell processor that was discussed at the press conference is made up of 9 separate cores. There is a single 64-bit Power Processing Element (or Power Architecture Core) and 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The Power Processor Element (PPE) can best be thought of as a variation of a Power PC processor, though its an entirely new design, intending on "overseeing" the work of the whole Cell processor. The PPE sends off various instructions to the 8 SPEs which can then work autonomously.
Sony, IBM and Toshiba said that they have ran Cell processors at "greater than 4GHz", though they wouldn't name an exact speed. Performance of the processor is said to be in excess of 256GFLOPS (256 billion floating-point operations per second). That's an extremely large number, the sort that you normally throw around when you're talking about arrays of multiple processors or even supercomputers. Measuring FLOPS can be done in a few different ways, but as a comparable number the highest you could get from a fast Pentium 4 these days is somewhere in the upper 20's.
Cell is claimed to have "10X performance for many applications", which is in line with these numbers. The Power Processor Element can handle two threads simultaneously while each SPE can handle one, making for a total of 10 simultaneous threads, in line with the 10X performance number they're claiming. Sony, IBM and Toshiba declined to specify exactly which applications they were talking when they mentioned 10X performance, though we'd assume it's pure number crunching or data compression or encryption, those sorts of things.
Obviously, real-world performance for any processor is entirely dependent on how well any given piece of software is written for it, especially so for multi-processor (and multi-core) machines. When asked about how one would go about programming for Cell or how difficult the task of managing the SPEs would be, an IBM rep stated that there would be multiple programming models, allowing for different approaches to programming for Cell. Each programmer could theoretically pick and choose which method they like to work with and program that way. It was also said that language compilers for Cell (for C, C++, etc.) would be released as open-source so that anyone could learn to tinker with its innards or possibly mold a compiler around a separate programming style for different needs.
With something as powerful as Cell appears to be, heat is obviously a concern. The three companies behind it say that it runs solely on air-cooling, just as any desktop processor does. Cell also has built-in power management for keeping itself running cool, capable of operating at five separate power states.
So, there you have it. Sounds impressive indeed, though we have yet to actually see Cell running in any sort of real-world scenario. If the performance numbers that Sony, IBM and Toshiba claim are realistic, and more importantly, Cell is reasonable to program for, then we'll be looking at some insanely powerful hardware in the not-too-distant future, including Sony's next-generation console.
المصدر : IGN
هنا (http://ps2.ign.com/articles/585/585865p1.html)
معلومات بالإنجليزي عن سوني3 :
PS3 Power: Details on Cell
February 7, 2005 - Sony Computer Entertainment, IBM and Toshiba held a press conference in downtown San Francisco this morning to unveil more details on their collaborative Cell processor. While there are still a few details and bits of information that the three companies are keeping mum about for the moment, they did reveal and confirm plenty of specs that had been only rumors and guesses for some time now.
For those of you who like reading numbers more than words, here are some raw specs (which we'll discuss below):
Each Cell processor contains 8 Synergistic Processing Units and a single 64-bit Power Architecture Unit (All are RISC designs with SIMD)
Operates at >4GHz and capable of >256GFLOPS
256KB Local Storage per SPU and 512KB L2 Cache (2.5MB total)
128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor
High-speed internal element interconnect performing at 96B/cycle
234 million transistors
Prototype die size of 221mm^2
Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology
Backtracking for just a second to cover those who haven't been following recent events (for example, we've put a man on the moon), the Cell microprocessor is a multi-core processor that's designed to handle a large number of tasks simultaneously. The first known major use of the Cell processor will be Sony's next-generation gaming machine, which we'll refer to as PlayStation 3 for the time being (Sony has yet to announce its official name, but you can bet on PS3).
While there wasn't any mention of PlayStation 3 at the press conference per-se, you can assume that the following specs will be very close to what will be going into the system. While Cell is being called a "supercomputer on a chip", NVIDIA will actually be providing the GPU in Sony's next system, which you can read more about here. Knowing that, if Cell is anywhere near as fast as what the rumors and these specs say, we'll have our hands on an extremely fast console by the end of 2006 (if the rumored release time stands true)..
http://gearmedia.ign.com/gear/image/article/585/585862/details-on-cell-20050207005224717-000.jpg
.For the record, a wafer was actually shown at the press conference, proving that processors are actually coming off the line. It's good to know this thing actually exists.
A "specific" Cell processor was discussed at the conference. By "specific" we mean a certain design, though not necessarily clock speed. Cell is designed to be a scalable processor, meaning that more or fewer cores could be built into a single Cell processor. The following specs are based on the processor design that was discussed at the conference. Workstations, servers or other applications built with more cores could theoretically be many times faster.
The Cell processor that was discussed at the press conference is made up of 9 separate cores. There is a single 64-bit Power Processing Element (or Power Architecture Core) and 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The Power Processor Element (PPE) can best be thought of as a variation of a Power PC processor, though its an entirely new design, intending on "overseeing" the work of the whole Cell processor. The PPE sends off various instructions to the 8 SPEs which can then work autonomously.
Sony, IBM and Toshiba said that they have ran Cell processors at "greater than 4GHz", though they wouldn't name an exact speed. Performance of the processor is said to be in excess of 256GFLOPS (256 billion floating-point operations per second). That's an extremely large number, the sort that you normally throw around when you're talking about arrays of multiple processors or even supercomputers. Measuring FLOPS can be done in a few different ways, but as a comparable number the highest you could get from a fast Pentium 4 these days is somewhere in the upper 20's.
Cell is claimed to have "10X performance for many applications", which is in line with these numbers. The Power Processor Element can handle two threads simultaneously while each SPE can handle one, making for a total of 10 simultaneous threads, in line with the 10X performance number they're claiming. Sony, IBM and Toshiba declined to specify exactly which applications they were talking when they mentioned 10X performance, though we'd assume it's pure number crunching or data compression or encryption, those sorts of things.
Obviously, real-world performance for any processor is entirely dependent on how well any given piece of software is written for it, especially so for multi-processor (and multi-core) machines. When asked about how one would go about programming for Cell or how difficult the task of managing the SPEs would be, an IBM rep stated that there would be multiple programming models, allowing for different approaches to programming for Cell. Each programmer could theoretically pick and choose which method they like to work with and program that way. It was also said that language compilers for Cell (for C, C++, etc.) would be released as open-source so that anyone could learn to tinker with its innards or possibly mold a compiler around a separate programming style for different needs.
With something as powerful as Cell appears to be, heat is obviously a concern. The three companies behind it say that it runs solely on air-cooling, just as any desktop processor does. Cell also has built-in power management for keeping itself running cool, capable of operating at five separate power states.
So, there you have it. Sounds impressive indeed, though we have yet to actually see Cell running in any sort of real-world scenario. If the performance numbers that Sony, IBM and Toshiba claim are realistic, and more importantly, Cell is reasonable to program for, then we'll be looking at some insanely powerful hardware in the not-too-distant future, including Sony's next-generation console.
المصدر : IGN
هنا (http://ps2.ign.com/articles/585/585865p1.html)