Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 4th Feb 2006 18:49 UTC
IBM is expected to demonstrate a blade server next week based on the Cell processor the company is developing with Toshiba and Sony. The Cell processor, which also is the brains of Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 videogame console, has a PowerPC processing core supplemented by eight special-purpose cores to boost the chip's calculation abilities.
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RE[2]: Future PowerMac?
by jonas.kirilla on Mon 6th Feb 2006 07:28
in reply to "RE: Future PowerMac?"
Member since:2005-07-11
If Apple's CoreImage/CoreVideo can tap the power of the Cell SPEs without exposing applications to Cell specifics, why wouldn't it be suitable? Are you saying a GPU is better suited? These APIs look like Apple is trying to free itself of the single SIMD/platform, by providing a blessed system interface to GPUs (+ FPGAs & DSPs ?) and perhaps Cell. What do you think, rayiner?
Member since:2005-07-06
I think Cell would be very suitable for CoreImage/CoreVideo, and I think you're absolutely right that Apple (and the industry in general) is trying to free itself from SIMD tied to the main CPU. However, I think that all the talk about Apple using Cell as the CPU for a PowerMac is quite silly --- right up there with using the GPU as the CPU in the machine!
Member since:
2005-07-06
Cell would suck as a PowerMac CPU. It's performance running general purpose code is going to be very low, even at 3.2 GHz. Universal binaries would never take advantage of Cell's power, since Cell doesn't appear to the software as a conventional SMP system. Code has to be specially written to submit work to the SPEs in a batch-oriented fashion, and the power of the Cell will be wasted without such specially written code. At that point, it makes more sense to use the GPU as a coprocessor hidden behind an API like CoreImage/CoreVideo.