in other words, no. programmers won't take the time to learn how to write new machine language. nor should they... AMD and Intel are doing just fine competing against one another. the last thing we need is another new processor.
the current generation and variation of cell will never see the light of day on a desktop.
I think we must look at this in terms of the initial idea for the Cell CPU
Sony's vision for the first generation cell CPU is PS3 and LCD TV systems for home entertainment. They want to integrate all on a common platform that can be used for networking around homes and streaming content directly (this is one of the Cell's strongest points - see the demo of Cell streaming 32 video sequences at once).
Second generation CPU's will be found in other additional appliances around the home and office, again for similar reasons.
As this is currently Sony and Toshiba's sole vision it is likely other companies will jump on the bandwagon and introduce their very own 'Cell' style CPU's with similar specs and uses, in similar appliances, perhaps even utilising the initial blueprint for the CPU.
It's the start of a new generation of 'intelligent' home entertainment systems, and fair dos to Sony, they are at the forefront. It's only a matter of time before our TV's and PC's decide for us what channel to watch or station to choose.
As for the Cell and it's threat to the humble PC architecture, well, I personally think we will see a massive shift in the market over the next 5 years. The simple, stand alone PC base unit will become a thing of the past, and as we all install electrical induction loops and wireless networks around our homes, seperate processing boxes (such as base unit) will become irrelevent...
The individual neccessities will become key... i.e. we need a monitor to look at... so everything will become housed within that space-frame... for example, if the processor in the 42" lcd downstairs can handle the process you are trying to commit on the monitor upstairs, then why would you need another box or processor in the working room? it's all about space and energy saving now - its the future... and Sony have cleverly started it with the Cell CPU
To summarise, it's unlikely we will see desktops with cell because by the time of Cell's true maturity, desktops will be a thing of the past
No it's gonna be years to get the Cell to work with a desktop. Sure it is possible and they have plans, even Nvidia, ATI and Texas instruments have plans to produce cpus. But Intel and AMD is just fine so don't be expecting the Cell to be avialable to desktop pcs anytime soon.
It would be horrible at anything you throw at it, any piece of code that you throw at that processor will run like shit. The design of that processor is soo bad. It makes no sence it was created to be cheap and thats it, the only reason why it recieves soo much spot light is because sony hypes this shitty processor up. The only thing that would be running your desktop would be the single ppe core, which is in-order, has a 512 kb cache its a 2 issue core, it has to scheduel all of the operations for those other 9 cores. Those 9 cores have to wait for the ppe core to send them/ scheduel an operation. Those 9 cores are being feed off of one pipeline they also only have a 256 kb cache which isnt adequate for any operation of any magnitude, there will be alot of cache misses in both the ppe core and the spes. What ibm doesnt tell you about the performance of the cell, is that they take the MAX/ PEAK performance of one spe, then they multiply that number by the ammount located on the chip, then they add the gflop performance of the ppe core. What they arent telling you that calculation is ridiculously flawed, as they arent factoring in a real world environnement, where the spes have to wait for the ppe to scheduel them an operation, and many other things. To sum this all up, its a poor performing proccessor, with a horrendously flawed design and is made to be cheap and thats it.
It has been discussed many times here. Don't be or get discouraged by the remarks of non-knowers. I provided you with a link that may give you a clue to the future of the Cell processor. Below is a snipet. To sum up, LBNL, after thorough testing, confirmed the processing power is 8x greater than any current processor of any company. STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) with minor modifications will be able to bring this to workstations. I am not sure if this means desktops, but since the two words are interchanged so often I am certain of its meaning. Please not the part about doubling the current effects of the processors' power.
"... The authors argue that Cell's three-level memory architecture, which decouples main memory accesses from computation and is explicitly managed by the software, provides several advantages over mainstream cache-based architectures. First, performance is more predictable, because the load time from an SPE's local store is constant. Second, long block transfers from off-chip DRAM can achieve a much higher percentage of memory bandwidth than individual cache-line loads. Finally, for predictable memory access patterns, communication and computation can be effectively overlapped by careful scheduling in software.
Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency," the authors wrote. While their current analysis uses hand-optimized code on a set of small scientific kernels, the results are striking. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors, despite the fact that Cell's peak double precision performance is fourteen times slower than its peak single precision performance. If Cell were to include at least one fully utilizable pipelined double precision floating point unit, as proposed in their Cell+ implementation, these speedups would easily double...."
Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Are you serious ??????? wtf. Dude my single core amd would rip the cell apart. Any dual core would rip the cell apart, it is not a powerful core. Analyse its archetecture for yourself, look at a few documents that arent IBM biased. And arent throwing unrealistic flawed calculations at you.
Are you serious ??????? wtf. Dude my single core amd would rip the cell apart. Any dual core would rip the cell apart, it is not a powerful core. Analyse its archetecture for yourself, look at a few documents that arent IBM biased. And arent throwing unrealistic flawed calculations at you.
Just run recompiled x86 binaries on it, I'm sure that after he sees what all of us know about IBM's wonder chip he will go back on what he said.
I think the thing Cell will bring to computing is some advancements in multi threaded programming and maybe more physics in PC games when they do the normal movie based games that hit every single platform. Thats a good thing, but I dont think you will be able to buy a Cell based PC any time soon (maybe Sony will make one in Japan running Linux ???) with Linux I could see some use for it but those Linux guys can get it running on a toaster....
Multithreading on the cell will prove very slow. The ppe doesnt have an adequate cache size to actually scheduel operations for 9 cores, plus do all of the general purpose code that the spes cannot actually do. There isnt enough cache to do this efficiently, plus that core either way isnt powerful enough to do so. This core is sevral steps back from what we already have, just because it runs at 3.2 ghz doesnt mean anything. It probably has a deeper pipeline to get this 3.2 ghz clock speed, plus its only 2 issue. That whole processor is horrendously designed. What kind of quak wrote that article ?? this is something new to me... I was sure hardware would be better suited to manage memory then software... i mean this is all new to me software being faster then the hardware that runs it..... because you know that software is going to use up clock cycles running this software code...honestly. Also power and efficiency ??? the cell was burning up, was burning the hardware around the ppe core and the motherboard, sure.... thats really good power and efficiency.
Yes Mike995, you catching on quickly. This is why Rambus's new memory is used. Because of the limited caches sizes on the chip, the throughput and speed of the DRAM counters this problem. In effect, you can have an unlimited cache size, limited only by the amount of DRAM.
I know what your thinking. The memory controller will slow it down. Ah-Ha! The SPEs have direct memory access coordinated by the PPC chip.
The following is directly from IBM's website and refers to the use of local storage (DRAM) as a form of cache.
... "To further reduce power, the team opted for a heterogeneous configuration with a novel SIMD-centered architecture. This configuration combines the flexibility of an IBM 64-bit Power Architecture™ core with the functionality and performance-optimized SPU SIMD cores. In this organization, the SPU accelerators operate from a local storage that contains instruction and data for a single SPU. This local storage is the only memory directly addressable by the SPU.
The SPU architecture was built to: -provide a large register file, -simplify code generation, -reduce the size and power consumption by unifying resources, and -simplify decode and dispatch."...
