Cell Chip Coming To the PC Via a PCI Express Card 164
arcticstoat writes with an excerpt from Custom PC: "After developing a brand new CPU architecture from the ground-up, you'd expect that Toshiba, Sony and IBM would have more uses for the Cell architecture than the PlayStation 3, and Toshiba has been quick to make use of the architecture's HD video transcoding abilities in its new Qosimo laptops. However, Leadtek is now taking Toshiba's efforts a step further by putting the chip onto a PCI-E card for desktop PCs. The WinFast PxVC1100 is based on Toshiba's SpursEngine SE1000 processor, which is a cut-down version of the Cell chip. The SpursEngine chip features four SPEs (synergistic processing elements) based on 128-bit RISC cores, along with H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs, but it doesn't contain its own CPU as the chip in the PS3 does. The chip is capable of encoding and decoding H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video streams in hardware."
Er... supercomputers? (Score:2, Insightful)
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The whole point is that this is a way to get Cell power in "Personal Computers", rather than supercomputers or games consoles.
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So we can get "cell power" and then all we have to do is write cell empowered applications !
This is so exciting, I can hardly wait ! Soon I'll be able to index my cactus seeds in no time ! (I've got almost 30)
I mean, gosh !
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Yeah, I can't understand why anyone would want a crippled Cell. I really doubt they are all that superawesome powerful in the PS3 so why would I want something less powerful in my computer?
Also the price will probably be to expensive compared to what you get for the money.
For general computing shouldn't say an Intel Q9550 be a much better choice? Or if I'd really wanted something this specialized why not get whatever Nvidia-card and use their CUDA-stuff?
Where is the market for this card? Sure it may be sad
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(I thought it was obvious so I never said it but also modern graphic cards already do HD-video decoding so this is useless there to, just get a decent graphics card.)
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This card is supposed to do HD Encoding. Not just decoding.
Show me a current application that uses your GPU to do good H.264 or MPEG2 encoding in realtime and I'll bite.
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This card is supposed to do HD Encoding. Not just decoding
That may be true, but that significantlty limits the potential market for this chip. I'd say just off the cuff that MUCH less than %1 of the total video market has a need to encode HD in real-time, or is encoding HD often enough to notice the improvement.
For the less than %5 of the video market who have EVER encoded their own HD video, most of them don't do it often enough to notice an improvement. And without noticeable improvement, they cannot ju
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First of all, not every product manufactured had to appeal to 90% of the market or sell 10 million units to be successful. Who knows what their target sell rate is, but it sure as hell won't be iPod numbers. A vendor could sell 10,000 cards and have a very successful product depending on R&D costs. For something like this, they just assembled existing parts onto a PCB and probably tied togeter some software for it.
I would love to be able to encode HD video with some decent speed. I've re-coded BD
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Wow! You have no idea how computers and grahpics cards work, do you?
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It's a laptop, so actually I don't know if it's that likely that it does have anything better than a 7800. Possible though.
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8600M GS, 2 GB RAM (512 dedicated 1.5GB shared out of system's 4 GB)
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Maybe somewhat like the 7800 then? The GS is higher clocked but only have half the stream processors of the GT, but since it's a newer version.
I don't know how they compare, but must be quite similar.
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Assassin's Creed, 1440x900 maximum everything - flawless. Crysis, 1440x900 medium-high detail and it runs decently. This laptop is a surprising powerhouse. Anything using the Source engine runs flawlessly as well. I've yet to find anything that seriously stresses this system's capabilities.
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I have a Macbook Pro with the 8600m GT so twice as many stream processors but lower clock, but I would be afraid it would perform worse due to Apples retardness of using 128 MB vram.
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You'd only really have any problems with really high resolutions and texture/filtering settings. Yes, that 128 megs of VRAM absolutely limited your capability and performance for gaming and some graphics design, but you're still able to run just about anything.
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Yeah, and there's that whole "Roadrunner" thing, fastest supercomputer in the world. And IBM sell Cell bladeservers...
Re:Er... supercomputers? (Score:4, Funny)
meep meep?
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mythtv apps (Score:5, Interesting)
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As many have said, this isn't cost-effective for the hobbyist (assuming there is proper Linux support, which is unlikely) unless he's encoding shitloads of video i.e. he as at least 4 HD streams he's encoding. This is more for content providers making dedicated encoding boxes.
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I hope Leadtek already got CVS commit accounts in VLC, mplayer, ffmpeg, x264 projects for their optimisations.
That is the most practical way to gain full support to Windows, OS X and Linux. Also imagine a micro laptop which can crunch data better than a desktop PC when on demand.
Re:mythtv apps (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:mythtv apps (Score:5, Informative)
Most modern CPUs cannot decode 1080p blu-rays in linux. The video card has nothing to do with it, as there is no support in any linux driver for GPU assisted decoding of anything apart from mpeg2, and even that is shoddy. ffmpeg works well with two threads on dual core, but quad cores isn't buying much right now.
Low bitrate 1080p rips on the net are not the same quality nor difficulty.
Yes, a dual/quad core super-fast intel setup can do it (and the mythtv list has a big thread right now about what it takes for full blu-ray rips) but right now those machines are expensive and loud.
This card could be perfect for people making HTPCs who want a low power and QUIET computer to watch on their TV using myth/etc.
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Most modern CPUs cannot decode 1080p blu-rays in linux. The video card has nothing to do with it, as there is no support in any linux driver (...) This card could be perfect for people making HTPCs who want a low power and QUIET computer to watch on their TV using myth/etc.
So what made you think Linux would be any better supported on this card? By the way, it looks like UVD2 is coming to Linux with the ATI drivers soon (since they're usually late, before Christmas at least).
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I think linux would be better supported because of the current support of linux for the cell processor.
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I went without a video card at all just to avoid the noise issue, knowing I'm unlikely to get any full bitrate or blu-ray rips or even close.
Now if this thing could decode full bd rips real-time, and was cheaper than a video card, it would be intriguing. Though again, linux drivers would be neccessary. FTA thou
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Yesterday I read on a forum that the PS3 had problems decoding DivX and such (various and whatever format, in up to HD resolutions I guess) videos when used as a media player, but still it can play BluRay videos and such so it much have decent decoders for the codecs used for BluRay atleast.
Does anyone know why that is? Just shitty software from Sony? I assume they should be able to upgrade it to decent performance if they tried?
Re:mythtv apps (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, if your video is encoded with the DivX encoder, the PS3 will play it. It's only when the video is encoded by one of the "compatible" codecs do you run into issues. And, it might play them okay.. Sometimes not.
I have a few profiles set up in my various encoding apps, so I always get good DVD (with AC3) Rips for the PS3 and I can always convert downloaded videos/movies if necessary (usually not.)
The PS3 isn't as flexible as a PC for a media player but it's instant-on and it's pretty darned good. I play media over the network via TVersity.
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But it can play DivX with any options on?
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Well, I don't know about ANY options, but I have never had the PS3 not play a video encoded with DivX. Sony licensed DivX directly, so it should play anything encoded with it.
It plays most xVid codec encoded videos too, but not all of them.
Re:mythtv apps (Score:4, Insightful)
i was imagining how cool it'd be to have one of these + VIA EPIA/Eden micro-ATX (what's the smallest form factor that supports PCI-E?) for a HTPC/DVR. that is until i read that the card comes with a one-slot cooler. that would suggest that the processor runs pretty hot, and the slot cooler would probably make a good deal of noise.
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This won't help for this card, but it would help if you got a regular graphics card instead:
http://www.arctic-cooling.com/vga2.php?idx=147 [arctic-cooling.com]
They have other solutions as well.
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wow, that's pretty cool (no pun in tended). at first i thought you were just plugging another slot cooler, but that thing is pretty slick. have you gotten one yourself?
if it really does outperform active coolers then that's quite impressive. and at $30 it's cheaper than most liquid cooling solutions. add a Peltier/thermoelectric active cooler to that thing and you have the perfect silent cooling solution with no moving parts.
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No, but I read about it in some thread when I was picking components for a friends new machine. (He won't get that but I guess someone in another thread wanted a passive solution so he was recommended the 9600 GT or something like that.)
Yeah, they seem very cheap for what you get, they have solutions with fans to, which of course will make some noice but on the other hand give an even colder setup vs stock and still run much quiter according to the webpage.
I think they had a CPU cooler which is supposed to
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Oh, and btw, there exist Micro-ATX-motherboards with HD3200 or HD3300 built-in, those may be good enough for HD-video. Lots of nForce chipset motherboards to. Sure they are socket 775 so for Intel cpus instead of Via but there exist silent cooling solutions for those to. And I guess you could lower the voltage and clock aswell.
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The ATI 780g chipset is almost what you want. Micro-ATX form factor with built in Radeon 3100 graphics, fully capable of decoding BluRay on a low power CPU like a Sempron or 4850. Most boards have HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs. Fanless, 4 RAM slots, six (!) SATA ports and capable of idling at 30W with a good PSU.
If Linux support for hardware video decoding is lagging, hopefully now ATI have released the specs for their hardware it will catch up to the Windows side.
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MiniITX. CN896 supports PCIE. I have no idea what other chipsets support it or will support it. Good news is that Logicsupply.com (just lurking there lately) has one of those boards with PCIEx16 (1.5GHz CPU, a lot like SN, but without CompactFlash though that adapter costs like 4$ at DealExtreme) for 144$.
Cooler does not look bad. Considering you're using a card, you'd need an "expandable" case the kind with room for cards. So you could easily slap a dual-slot cooler if you want it passively cooled, because
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I was thinking something along those lines, using it to speed up decodes on Linux. The problem is, when would support come, assuming support is necessary?
There's all sorts of ARM CPUs that can do h.264 (OSD2 is supposed to ship with one, but only for SDTV/EDTV, beagleboard does 720p but I'm not too sure what formats). The problem there is that they don't do HD.
Should this work really well under Linux, I could easily see VIA boards fitting dual PCIE (or seeing this card for a different bus, or using a riser)
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Something that can do realtime encoding of HD h264 is nothing
to sneeze at and not something that can be easily replicated
by any combination of multiple general purpose processors
running in parallel. Even if you could manage, it would you
want to dedicate the equivalent of a Mac Pro to it?
Even at $250, the equivalent of a Hauppauge 1212 on a PCI
card exploitable by mplayer or transcode or avidemux would
be a whole lot more useful.
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This is already 2005s years gadget or something like that. The Cell is not state of the art now.
Linux support (Score:2)
I won't be as much pessimistic.
There is already lots of support for CELL processors in the open source world (for example, PS3 runs Linux out of the box and SPUs are the only way to have decent 3D graphics as the hyper-visor locks the access to the GPU).
The only difficulties are going to be how to communicate with the SPU units on the card. Then, the chips that runs on the other side of the PCIe pipe isn't unknown.
As soon as the communication between main PC's CPU and the board's SPU is understood, you have
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Well, perhaps. But remember, the PS3 runs on Cell and you can develop for Cell on Linux if you install it on the PS3.
I don't think Linux support for a card like this is out of the question.
Man. So many doomsayers around here lately.
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Doesn't the Folding@Home project have a client that runs on the PS3? Doesn't that client use the Cell system to churn through work at a much faster pace than a regular CPU? If they can access the processor, I'm sure this will be accessible.
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To add to my comment:
http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3 [stanford.edu]
How does the PS3 client's visualization compare to other FAH clients?
The PS3 client supports advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.
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But yes, I agree that this shouldn't be overdifficult on the accessibility side.
I think I can already do that (Score:2, Informative)
Don't video cards do that? or does this thing just sorta add juice to your system?
I WANT THIS TO BE AWESOME but I'm just a bit underwhelmed.
Re:I think I can already do that (Score:4, Informative)
-in linux, no. only mpeg2 decoding
-in any OS, not really. There is a brand new ENCODER for h.264, but reviews show it to be crap and limited
Windows does have full GPU decoding of h.264 with modern nvidia (not sure about ATI, but it is likely), but that's it.
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XviD and DivX are the two most popular video codecs used on the internet, both of which are MPEG-4 Part 2 encodings. i would hardly consider it irrelevant. XviD in particular is useful because it provides high-quality video compression under a GNU license and is supported on all platforms. H.264 is a patented codec, so despite there being open source implementations, it's still excluded from certain FOSS products.
the author probably wanted to specifically mention H.264 because it's a very well-known encodin
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Its not meant for playback of a single video like the GFX cards do, or watch a DVD or Blu-ray, its designed for content creation and distribution. In an early demo, the Cell did 48 simultaneous Mpeg2 streams in real-time.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/playstation/cell-processor-demos-mpeg2-x-48-100853.php [gizmodo.com]
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No. Video cards don't do any encoding.
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I believe the confusion stems from ATI's AVIVO Video Encoder.
Yes, it is a fast video encoder. No, it does not use the GPU; instead, it uses optimizations that sacrifice quality for performance.
I personally find it really sad that ATI made the claim in 2005 that the converter would eventually be hardware-accelerated, and failed to deliver on that promise.
Two things (Score:2, Interesting)
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Any PCIe card is a 'mac version' just as much as it is a 'PC version' - perhaps you mean will there be drivers or a developer API for the Mac - the good thing is that a lot of Linux geeks will be wanting this (probably good for University research projects), and if there is Linux support then basically you will already have OSX support.
The interesting question is, what are you planning to do with it that you can't already do fast enough with a multicore CPU, GPU or physics type add in card? Or do you just w
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You've never tried to write a Mac OS X driver, have you? If so, you'd know you couldn't be more wrong. OS X uses a totally different different architecture; they are not even close. OS X uses I/O Kit. Not even FreeBSD is close.
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No, I've never written drivers so I'm quite ignorant in that area. I guess I was just thinking more of a linux library which takes advantage of the abilities of the card, but you would indeed need a driver for that to be useful.
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However, if it works under Linux, you can bet your ass that means the hardware has been "figured out" and so could be brought to other OSs.
Open docs always works best, but what can you do? =/
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If it's cheap enough, it's an affordable Cell processor to play^H^H^h^Hprototype with. :)
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No, because macs use EFI so they atleast require special graphics cards. So special cards for this purpose may not be as strange as it sounds.
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That's probably because iPhones aren't really advanced. I had a 3G touchscreen smartphone (HTC TyTN) about a year and a half before the first gen iPhone even hit the streets.. I have always liked Macs since I was a kid (we had a Mac Classic which I used to play games on, write up my homework on, and I even did a bit of coding on it), but iPods and iPhones don't interest me too much. I doubt you'd be able to do anything useful with a Cell PCIe card unless you are heavily into scientific research, cryptograph
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i couldn't agree with you more. personally, i love my PSP to death. it's the only gaming system i have, and i use it all the time to read e-books, listen to audiobooks, or play PSX games. once you get CFW on it, there's no other handheld out there that can compare as a general portable entertainment device.
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Definitely. I used to do a lot of hobbyist coding at home (been 7 years since I left home for Uni), but after I started university I spent most of my free time socialising, and since then I've not done any coding outside of work because I've just been wanting to relax.
I miss doing my own projects at home though - the coding I do at work is pretty mundane. It can still be rewarding sometimes, but compared to creating a game that you can play, and creating AI opponents etc, writing up an engineering or produc
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heh, that's funny 'cause i'm kinda in the same boat. i do graphic design & web development, which does give me some opportunity to write web applications, but i still miss having personal coding projects that i'd stay up all night working on. i sorta fell out of the habit senior year of high school (started dating and my priorities changed). since then i'm a lot less productive during my free time. i spend most of my time these days playing Front Mission 3 on PopStation and watching Star Trek episodes o
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Indeed, it just needs a kickstart to break out of routine. I naturally go through phases of being interested in different stuff anyway, I just want to try and make my next several phases something that will get me coding some games again :)
Unfortunately my attempt to get myself back into photography again just involved me buying an expensive camera and it sitting on a shelf in my cupboard. Despite the fact that I've got into a habit of going for walks on weekends rather than driving everywhere, I never thin
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It wasn't flamebait. Possibly passive aggressive, that sounds a lot like me, but I don't think anyone is going to get a kick out of this card unless they are at least a serious amateur coder. At least physics cards have a few games that work with them - this thing is not meant for anything as common as gaming.
I was thinking about it a bit more and realised it would be a good way to get to know the cell architecture if you are planning on doing something with it in future, like getting into PS3 games develop
Why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
This spurs engine sounds just like an extra GPU...
Why not just go with CUDA or some other GP-GPU platform and avoid the hassle?
I know nVidia and AMD/ATI are doing H.264 decoding in hardware using their GPUs... I'm sure you can get software for encoders too.
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
CUDA is a matrix processor. This is a serial processor. CUDA isn't really applicable to general purpose tasks. This is. CUDA gets its power by running the same function over an array of inputs to generate an array of outputs.
Different beasts.
But then the question is (Score:3, Insightful)
What does it have over a normal multi-core processor, like say a Core 2 Quad?
The problem I've been seeing with the Cell both in terms of how it performs in the PS3 and the researchers tinkering with it at work (I work for a university) is that it doesn't really seem to have something that it is great at. A lot of the tasks people tout for it are highly parallel tasks, like Folding@Home. Ok, wonderful, except a GeForce crushes it. A GTX 280 using the CUDA client is much faster than a Cell. Ok so, not for tas
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Yes, but... (Score:2, Informative)
...can it play Crysis?
Because if not, seeing as modern graphics cards [wikipedia.org] all feature hardware MPEG, I'm kind of underwhelmed by this announcement.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Does it run ... ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I RTFA, but I didn't find an answer in it.
Hopefully so, unless they really hate Linux. (Score:3, Informative)
Unless they purposefully fucked the register table to prevent it, it's probably just a matter of finding the correct PCIe offsets to access known registers/segments on the CELL. While it's possible they could "sabotage" it to prevent the first-day-out-of-the-box Linux driver, chips modified this way usually have to go under m
I hope I have room for another card! (Score:3, Funny)
::checks case::
Ooh, awesome! I have one more PCI-E slot left, right next to my PhysX accelerator! Where do I pre-order?
I can see a use for it.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Attempting to integrate Leadtek l33tripZ SE (Now with the crushing power of the "buggy, ill-defined, good enough for consumers" h.246 profile in hardware! Totally Vista compatible(32 bit systems only, when run as administrator during waxing moon)) into a professional workflow? World of pain.
So
50/50. (Score:5, Interesting)
If it has good general purpose support(I'd really prefer that this mean "good documentation" and properlinux support; but I suspect a proprietary sdk would do alright as well) then it could be a killer in certain lower end computing scenarios. Since the cell is produced in nontrivial bulk, and this thing is only about 1/2 the complexity of a full cell(does that mean that this card is "spursengine on the half-cell?) it should be cheap, cheap, cheap compared to FPGA boards or custom ASICs for such purposes as the cell architecture is useful.
I hope the do the right thing, and get rewarded(and I hope so, surely somebody looking to sell computational hardware would see the virtues of making it as useful as possible for as many customers as possible?); but if they don't, I suspect that they'd be lucky to do as well as physX, and will probably do worse.
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Shit man... (Score:3, Funny)
I want to be a synergistic procesing element!
Doesnt everyone?
Only pci-e x1 and 128meg of ram? ati, nv cards hav (Score:3, Insightful)
Only pci-e x1 and 128meg of ram? ati, nv cards have more ram at a lower cost with a pci-e x16 link.
The x1 link will slow this down. HTX is even better then pci-e for a add in cpu.
See also, Mercury Computers (Score:2)
Link to the card. [mc.com]
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How Not to Build a Multicore Processor (Score:2, Insightful)
The Cell is a perfect example of how not to design and build a multicore processor. It's a powerful processor but it's a pain in the ass to program. The worst thing that a multicore designer can do is build a processor before the programming model is designed and tested and all the chinks ironed out. But Sony and IBM are not alone. Intel is making the same mistake with Larrabee. AMD is soon to follow suit with its Fusion hybrid. It's enough to make a grown man cry. The truth should be clear to everyone by n
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For more general purpose work, MIMD is useful. I have to wonder why Cell didn't take more cues from the Transputer. From what I've read, The Cell seems to be based on the idea of running mu
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But Sony and IBM are not alone. Intel is making the same mistake with Larrabee. AMD is soon to follow suit with its Fusion hybrid. It's enough to make a grown man cry.
Hmm. Interesting argument, but did you consider the possibility that Sony, IBM, Intel and AMD are right, and you're not?
Chip production yield was _that_ poor? (Score:2)
IIRC, the PS3 offers 7 SPEs, so they can increase their yield by letting those with one blown/bad SPE still ship, reserving the full 8-working SPE units to more expensive applications. So the chips in these cards are so bad that they have up to 4 dead SPEs and a dead PPE as well?
I wouldn't think that there'd be enough of a market segment to create a separate, more limited version of this chip just for applications like this. This have got to be their mitigation strategy for incredibly low yield.
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SpursEngine is not a partial good Cell; it's a different chip.
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It's just 4 SPE's without the controlling CPU. This has nothing to do with yields and is a set of separately made parts.
How is this new? (Score:4, Informative)
Mercury had a PCI-e cell expansion card [mc.com] for over a year now.
Unlike the leadtek one, the mercury version has the full version of the cell processor, with 8SPEs. Dont think it comes with any prebuilt codecs though.
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It also has a price tag of 8K for a complete version including 2x gigabit & 4 GB of RAM. This is serious stuff, not something you would want to put into, say, a media streaming PC of under 10K.
Personally the thing that is really new is the price point and the preinstalled codecs (if any). This would be pretty usefull for e.g. surveillance, where you might want to put a lot of security camera's onto one PC.
Is this really needed? (Score:2)
I remember when Creative and a few other companies had media decoder/encoader boards packaged with DVDROMS when they first came out, seems like a step back IMHO.
h264? (Score:2)
Whatever.
If it can encode _Dirac_ at faster-than-realtime, then that'd be something to shout about.
Re:yo yo yo (Score:4, Insightful)
sweet, i can finally have my PVR record programs before they actually air!
but seriously though, how much is this card going to cost? is it just for professional video processing or will there be other uses for it as well? i wouldn't mind having one of these things for a PVR/media center, except for the fact that it needs a one-slot cooler, meaning it probably runs hot and noisy.
Re:yo yo yo (Score:5, Funny)
Lets say the PS3 retails for £300 (it's less than this, but what the hell, this is slashdot, we don't need to be accurate. Or impartial for that matter...let me start again) Lets say the shitty PS3 costs £300, which is far too bloody much, but once you take away the shitty Blu-Ray drive, the shitty Hard drive, shitty controller, shitty case, etc. the price for the shitty fully-fledged CELLs (7 of them, remember) can't be more than £100 and that's a safe overestimation, with added money for the Lube Sony will use to anally violate you with their shitty cocks. This chip has only 4 shitty cores of the shitty CELL and it's not even the full CELL, it's a shitter version of it so I'd say it's a safe bet that it SHOULD cost no more than £50-70, but since the company that makes it is so shitty, they'll probably triple that price. Cunts.
One-Slot Cooler (Score:3, Informative)
i wouldn't mind having one of these things for a PVR/media center, except for the fact that it needs a one-slot cooler, meaning it probably runs hot and noisy.
Look at the pictures : the cooler looks rather small, and seems to be of the standard type that you find over most low-end GFX cards and some chipsets.
As long as there's sufficient air-flow in your HTPC, you could probably swap if for on of those heat-pipe based monstruosities that you can fit over standard GPU and use passive cooling or low noise big fan. (something like this [sapphiretech.com])
Of course, given the standard shape, you could also put a water cooling block on it.
but seriously though, how much is this card going to cost? is it just for professional video processing or will there be other uses for it as well?
Well, I think this is going to be the tricky par
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This can encode, however.
If it can encode HD (720p/1080i/1080p, at least the first two, with a fairly high-bitrate h.264) then it's sold. There's no point to using Windows on your HTPC with a noisy video card when you can use this with MythTV (if there was any advantage to windows on a machine like that in the first place...).
If IBM gives us an MIT/BSD licensed option (or is this only kernel/userland? in which case GPL or apache would be ok) then it's sold sold sold, easily, and I would buy one the day I co
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SpursEngine has 1/4th the performance of Cell; you do the math.
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Emulating 7 3.2 GHz SPEs with 16 1.5 GHz SPEs connected with virtually no bandwidth sounds difficult.