Cell processor

[The Borg]

Hi all,

Saw this article link and was windering how it may work with the PS3 folding software?

Any ideas? Being a PCIe card (and a one lane) it may be an idea to put a few into a machine. all depends on software support I suppose.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Nice! But $375 - $400 is a heck of a price tag. It will be absolutely wonderful later on when they get cheaper. If they get popular enough, I'm sure someone would come out with a client just for the processor, much like how they've done with the video cards.

 

[The Borg]

TTT, Any more comments on usage?

FMC - I agree, high cost.

 

[Foxery]

An interesting concept, but it sounds like Toshiba has no idea what they've got, and are squandering it. They licensed the technology to decode video in laptops? ATI and nVidia integrated graphics chips already do that for 1/10th the cost and 1/10th the electrical power!

The article at Tom's mentions a desktop version, which is even more foolish, as anyone with an HTPC has already bought a Radeon 2400 or 3400 for a whopping $30 to do exactly the same thing. Since the Toshiba card doesn't even have a display connector, you need to already have a functioning video processor anyway.

This could have been useful, but honestly, what were they thinking?

 

[JonB]

I noticed in my college alumni letter from Louisiana Tech that they have specifically set up a Playstation 3 lab just to use the Cell Processors. Probably common on a lot of engineering school campuses. I think we'll see good things in the future for add-in boards like this.

 

[faxon]

the military actually uses playstation 3 farms to the tune of about 50 units for real time 3D tactical mapping from what i hear. the cell processor is just a beast for distributed/parallel computing power. i was going to be joining the anandtech distributed computing team sometime here in the near future and i was considering buying a playstation3 to use primarily as a computing machine since it is only $3-400 vs $3-4000 for an 8 core nehalem with tri-SLI GTX280s (though a nehalem test bed will be built at some point regardless)

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: faxon
the military actually uses playstation 3 farms to the tune of about 50 units for real time 3D tactical mapping from what i hear. the cell processor is just a beast for distributed/parallel computing power. i was going to be joining the anandtech distributed computing team sometime here in the near future and i was considering buying a playstation3 to use primarily as a computing machine since it is only $3-400 vs $3-4000 for an 8 core nehalem with tri-SLI GTX280s (though a nehalem test bed will be built at some point regardless)

:roll:

But your $300-400 investment won't even get you 5% of the ppd the 10x more expensive build would crank out. A PS3 is good for like 1,000 ppd while a single GTX 280 can produce about 7,000 ppd by itself (so a build like you've described will probably approach 30,000 ppd with 3 GPU clients & 2-3 SMP clients crunching). You would need 30 PS3s to keep up with a monster like that and I don't even want to think what the power bill would be like.