Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 17th Jun 2006 22:22 UTC
A new paper from a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, "The Potential of the Cell Processor Scientific Computing" [.pdf], explores the performance of IBM's Cell processor on some specific types of code commonly found in high-performance computing applications. The paper compare Cell's performance on these kernels to the performance of the Cray X1E, AMD Opteron, and Intel's Itanium2. The idea here is that Cell will be a commodity processor (at least that's what the authors and IBM hope), so it'll be a viable HPC alternative for the cost-sensitive academic research market. This paper represents the first formal academic attempt to decide if Cell hardware is something that researchers will want to invest in. So how does Cell stack up in comparison to these three competitors? In a word, it screams.
Permalink for comment 135045
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-07-06
an FPGA clocked at a mere 100MHz could do it all in parallel and literally do a 576-bit * 576-bit multiplication in 2-3 clockcycles.
No way. Perhaps at 10 MHz, if you had a big enough FPGA. But even the fattest Virtex-4 (in a >1000-pin package) has "only" 512 dedicated 18-bit multipliers (forget about doing this in regular FPGA fabric). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to do all the partial multiplications in parallel, you'd need (576/18)^2 = 1024 of those multipliers, and then you still need enough LUT to add them all up.