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.
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Member since:2005-08-26
Ok, so I forgot to mention that Cell does have double-precision support as well... Maybe I forgot because the double-precision performance stink.
You mean all of us console companies, defense contractors, medical computing, media companies are all wasting our time on Cell based systems???
I'm only aware of a single console company (Sony) that is playing with the Cell.
I'm not aware of any defense contractors, medical computing or media companies that are building anything around Cell.
Member since:2005-07-06
1) The article was about Cell's double-precision performance. While the article did test simulation, rather than hardware, it showed that Cell's double-precision performance could be quite usable as well.
2) Raytheon is working with IBM to use Cell in defense applications, Mercury Computer Systems is releasing a Cell-based blade server for industrial and medical computing, and Toshiba is going to use Cell in HDTVs.
Member since:2005-08-12
Member since:
2006-02-08
"One problem with the cell is that it is only single-precision "
Bzzzt!!!
Your competence to comment on the topic is not that impressive.
"Something that you're not likely to spend that much time on in a real world application"
You mean all of us console companies, defense contractors, medical computing, media companies are all wasting our time on Cell based systems???
Oh no!