IBM's Radical Cell Processor 298
Rouslan Solomakhin writes "Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell processor. Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics. Applications in other areas are also considered." From the article: "Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years."
Re:Bad link? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:IBM really needs to prove themselves (Score:1, Informative)
On the Cell Processor from the source (Score:5, Informative)
Lol, mod parent up Funny as hell (Score:2, Informative)
If the new consoles are going to sell in the same numbers as the existing ones then they will outsell Apples by a degree that just ain't funny.
One of the reasons Apple is switching to Intel is that IBM just didn't give a fuck about Apple. Not nearly enough chips in it. It has been Apples problem all along, it never could convince its chip makers to focus on the features its wanted since the real money was in embedded versions of the chips. Were power is less important and running without a fan is super important.
Re:PS3 Un*x (Score:2, Informative)
I N F O (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/home.html [ibm.com]
Because those "CPU"s aren't really CPUs.. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/librar y/pa-fpfxbox/?ca=dgr-lnxw09XBoxDesign [ibm.com]
First Cell product already shipping (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IBM really needs to prove themselves (Score:0, Informative)
Re:IBM really needs to prove themselves (Score:5, Informative)
Much of the reason Apple switched to Intel was because IBM didnt want to make the chips Apple watned.
Apple has for a long time made demands of their chip producers to make this and that chip with this and that feature, then they order a wery low volume at first to ensure they dont get stuck with an overflow should the product flop in any way.
Then they make new, larger, orders if the product is a hit and the chip producer runs into supplying dificulties. Apple blames the chips vendor.
This happened with the 68k, G4 and G5. When Apple wanted new CPU's IBM basicaly told them to get lost because they just wasnt a big enough client to justify the demands they made.
IBM managed quite well before the G5 deal and will manage quite well after.
(Just for the record: This was posted from my darling PowerBook! I am a Mac user and an Apple fanatic! So this is _not_ Apple-bashing, just a statement of facts!)
You're right, it's a major headache (Score:2, Informative)
For some more info, check out:
The Free Lunch is Over [www.gotw.ca], the article that sparked the discussion.
A talk Herb Sutter did on the Concur project, a research project into abstracting concurrency [sitestream.com], sorry IE only but it's worth it
Re:oh really? (Score:2, Informative)
I have seen a detailed analysis [events.ccc.de] at 22C3 of the Cell and it's impressive. Really, by any means. But the maximum gains will be achieved only after a few years/months after the PS3 is out and not in graphics but in AI, physics simulation. Also it looked very well if you're a blade server user, but you'll have to tweak your apps. It's a multicore and does not care about backward compatibility.
The slides of the presentation can be downloaded from http://gustav.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~htor/sec
Bottom line is that when the Emotion Engine (PS2 core processor) came out the claims where not substantiated by facts and Sony fudged its way through making hilarious claims (which no one in the mainstream press ridiculed at the time).
PS. There is a patent filed from Sony a few years back that basically says that Cell processor can communicate with each other and share their computing power, like in a room your PS3 can use your PC/PDA/Oven spare cycles to help you frag in better quality. Was hyped by Sony when they annouced the PS3 but havent seen anything in the PS3 at the moment.
But who cares in the end? The only thing that I'm excited about is the Revolution controller!
R.
Re:So how hard is it to program for Cell? (Score:3, Informative)
Writing concurrent software isn't that much more difficult than writing single threaded software, as long as you do a good job of partitioning the system into seperate control loops early on. The main difference will be a period of tweaking and adjusting the interplay of the different threads of execution in the system towards the end of development. It's not uncommon for this last stage to take more time than writing the code initially. A tactic that will help a lot is to build an event log into the software from the beginning that can be used to record when each thread finishes doing some processing task. The later version of the freescale 7400 series processor have many features for just this purpose, I would think the ibm 7400 core used in the cell would have the same features, but I am not sure.
A good language to look at for how concurrency can be supported is Ada. There is a lot of good stuff in Ada and a lot of bad stuff in Ada, but the designers did a very good job on the concurrency model.
Re:The Cell Chip (Score:2, Informative)
If there's anybody who has more details about Cell programming, I`m interested!
Re:Bad link? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Movie Quality? (Score:3, Informative)
Very true, but I think you do not fully understand real-time graphics.
Render farms are general purpose computers engaged in grid computing where the method is escentially "throw as much power as possible at rendering". Rendering packages such as Renderman use very sophistocated, realistic, and GENERAL techniques. Games and other real-time graphics applications, on the other hand, utilize SPECIALIZED techniques that are unique to their application. They are carefully optimized for hte game world and because of this, can achieve significantly superior performance at the cost of generality.
Just take a look at Fight Night 3 for XBOX 360: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sports/fightnight
Re:you can smell the fanboyism from here... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised that you mentioned Dead or Alive. The Playstation version had quite a few upgrades from the Saturn and Arcade versions. So many, in fact, that Tecmo ported the Playstation version back to the arcade as Dead or Alive++.
Saturn's 2D transparency is completely useless if developers can't figure out how to program it in. For instance, Konami couldn't figure out how to do it in Castlevania: Nocturne in the Moonlight [gamespy.com] (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) for the Saturn.
The Saturn's internal save space was battery backed, meaning that you lost all your saves if the battery went dead. It was also space limited, forcing you to buy save carts once it was full. Praytell that you have the correct save cart in the system on boot, because from what I've heard, changing them after the system was started is liable to erase the cart.
Remember AIM? Apple, IBM and "Motorola." (Score:2, Informative)
You can read here:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/ppc-1.
Forza is more accurate... (Score:3, Informative)
I dug up an old review I did of Forza (esp. vs GT4), and reposted it. Here's a link [1up.com].
On the Clarkson thing. I have to disagree, Forza did not get those things right. It got more right (see my review), but in Forza, turn 1 still doesn't exist, just like in GT4. Clarkson seems to refer to this. Now, in real life, I've never seen a vehicle that can ignore turn 1 on Laguna Seca. Even an underpowered car like a Spec Miata has to set up for turn 1 a little bit. I do feel that such a vehicle could perhaps exist. It would have to have slow acceleration and lots of lateral grip. In GT4 and Forza, you just drive right through (using the pit-out lane in Forza, you don't even have to do that in GT4).
Additionally, Clarkson is again right on with the area between turn 7 and 8 (8/8a is the Corkscrew, Clarkson refers to it as turn 7). In both games, you blast right over 7 (it's as much a bump as a turn), then do the braking after it. This is impractical in real life. First of all, as Clarkson alludes to, you'd simply fill your shorts. Cresting 7 at full bore, you'd have a wall about 300 feet ahead and a downhill zone to do your braking in. Additionally, most cars in the world just couldn't slow down in that short a distance in a downhill braking zone. Really, neither game gets good marks in this area.
Forza also for some reason has a very sticky turn 9. High-powered cars will drift out quite a bit in 9 in real life, and do somewhat in GT4. But not so in Forza. It's odd. Of course, in GT4, turn 10 is a real joke (like 6 is), so Forza still wins in this part of the course.
Referring to your comments about worthless cars being in GT4, often games do seem to bulk up on cars. None has an SUV race like PGR2 does though! I actually liked the SUV racing in PGR2, it was a change (like the Strana trucks in TOCA 2). But both are only gimmicks, I hope they don't expand upon them in the future. Drive PGR3 and you'll wish these shitboxes were back. PGR3 removes nearly every car any person could reasonably own from the game. I think the only ones left are the Mustang GT, Corvette C6 and Corvette ZR-1. I also know people who own Ferrari 355s (although not the F1 model) and Aston Martin DB9s, but I don't count those. The slowest car in the game is the Ferrari Testarossa. Annoying.
Lack of damage in GT4 doesn't bother me. Damage is mostly a hassle. Forza does try to keep the stupid AI mistakes from hurting your outcome, but it isn't completely successful. There's nothing worse than having to restart a race because the AI punched a hole in your car. This happened in TOCA 2 (most damage modelling yet), and it drove me nust. And TOCA 2 had fewer AI problems than Forza.
I do prefer that games try to keep you from driving on the wall and across the grass to reduce times, especially as online play becomes more important. Unfortunately, Forza didn't penalize you enough for hitting walls strategically, so it can be done to advantage. PGR3 adds slow-down penalties (like GT4 does in the rally races, but not as long) but left out the penalties for crossing the grass. So people cut several corners in the game. Very sad.
I don't feel GT4 feels a lot like GT3. Even GT4 Prologue had significant improvements over GT3. I'm not justifying their lack of online play or the zillion years it took to come out either, but to me it's quite a different game. Do you remember how bad GT3 was? It was greatly inferior to GT2 in game progression, because the removal of cars (and thus the removal of entry qualifications) made the game difficult and pointless at times.
I liked Forza, but as I mentioned in my review, there is plenty of room for improvement. I didn't finish Forza, the races become very difficult due to AI mauling at the high levels, and that's just not fun. And I didn't like the endurance racing in Forza. Despite the technological advancements of the Drivatar, it just didn't work for me.
Movie Quality Reder Farm is Chepar than You Think. (Score:3, Informative)