Playstation 3's CELL is 4.6 GHz

[Eug]

IBM, Sony, and SCEI Power-On Cell Processor-Based Workstation Prototype

NYT article (requires registration, but it's pretty vague anyway)

Cell Specs:

4.6 GHz
1.3 V
85 degrees Celcius operation using a heat sink
6.4 GB/s off-chip communication

For comparison, here is the supposed Xbox 2 schematics, which talks of a triple-core 3.5+ GHz CPU (also by IBM).

 

[JackBurton]

85°C!!! Jesus! I'll take 3 x 3.5GHz processors instead though. But we'll see how they (PS3 and XBox 2) perform when they come out. The new revision of the PS2 is really kick ass. Too bad I don't like any games for it.

 

[yhelothar]

Is the PS3 going to have a dedicated graphics accelerator unlike the PS2?
What's the need for the extremely powerful triple core 3.5GHz CPU in the xbox2?
The first xbox only used a 700MHz Pentium3 because the GPU did all the rendering and the CPU only had to do the AI calculations and the physics, thus not requiring an immensely fast CPU.

 

[Dolly]

BTW if by new revision of PS2 you mean the new one, thats much smaller, just like in PS1 it has none differences whatsoever, apart from being small, and it aint that smarted either since what they did in odrer to get the bigger part of the bulk out of the way is to take the power supply out of the console and hence now you have it hunging on the edge of the plague

 

[FFactory0x]

I call bullshiot. I mean seriously. These things will cost so much. You could slack off with 1 3.5+ghz cpu and just spend the restofthe money on RAM and a banging video card. I mean check out current xbox games such as Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2, etc. They are running on 700mhz and gforce 3 ultra. Also look at Resident Evil 4 and games on Gamecube. The gfx are sick.

 

[ViRGE]

The Cell design is interesting to say the least, but I'm not sure how much that is worth on the market. It comes from a good lineage, the POWER family, but at the same time there's nothing outlandishly amazing about it, since multicore and what-not have been in other POWER designs before. Unlike past designs, I have no doubts that Sony can hit their performance goals because of Cell's lineage, although it remains to be seen if the performance/power ratio comes in at where Sony would like it - 85C does not look very good from that perspective, but it also isn't surprising considering the difficulties Intel has had getting processors above 4ghz, so Sony may be on track to encounter a similar sort of problem on the 90nm production level.

The "features" of the chip also concerns me more perhaps than anything else. Sony is adding "security" features, which sound oddly like top-to-bottom DRM, ala Trusted Computing. It's one thing to lock out cheaters like how MS does it with the Xbox live, but I'm not sure I like the idea of locking out all modding entirely. It doesn't help that the Cell will be implemented in more devices than just the PS3. We'll see how things turn out though.

Oh, and some irony: all 3 next-gen consoles will be using some sort of POWER chip

 

[Wingznut]

Ok, settle down... Nowhere does it say that the PS3 will be 4.6ghz.

 

[Lonyo]

And I point you here

Date: August 28th, 2001

If you weren't too impressed by the Pentium 4 2.0GHz launch yesterday, then today's demo of a 0.13-micron Northwood Pentium 4 processor running at 3.5GHz should pique your interest.

3 years ago.
We just hit 3.6GHz with a new processor.

Later today Intel will be showing off an air-cooled 4GHz double pumped ALU (effectively 8GHz) from a future Intel processor. The interesting thing about this demo is that it will be a 32-bit ALU that's being shown off?

And something here?

At Fall IDF 2001 we mentioned a 5GHz, 32-bit ALU that Intel was demonstrating. That accomplishment came courtesy of the Intel Labs.

Do I believe they have a Cell processor running at 4.5GHz? Maybe.
Do I believe this product will be used in the PS3? Doubtful.

 

[jm0ris0n]

Yeah, don't get too gooiee about sony processor specs. When they first showed the ps2 everyone was wetting themselves over this 'advanced' console which can render 70 million triangles/Sec. Now boot up your ps2 and you won't see anything close to that number.

 

[Eug]

Ok, settle down... Nowhere does it say that the PS3 will be 4.6ghz.

Agreed. Cell can hit 4.6 GHz, but that doesn't mean the PS3 per se will be 4.6 GHz. In fact, it's likely it won't be. I will admit my title is a bit misleading though.

85°C!!! Jesus!

What's wrong with 85°C? This is likely without a fan, at 4.6 GHz. As Wingznut suggests, there's no confirmation that the version of Cell in the PS3 will be at 4.6 GHz.

I'll take 3 x 3.5GHz processors instead though.

Why? It sounds like an entirely different design. We have no idea what the comparative performance will be.

But we'll see how they (PS3 and XBox 2) perform when they come out.

Agreed.

I call bullshiot. I mean seriously. These things will cost so much. You could slack off with 1 3.5+ghz cpu and just spend the restofthe money on RAM and a banging video card. I mean check out current xbox games such as Ninja Gaiden, Halo 2, etc. They are running on 700mhz and gforce 3 ultra. Also look at Resident Evil 4 and games on Gamecube. The gfx are sick.

Of course, that presupposes that the PS3 is similar to current PC designs, which of course would be wrong. It also presumes that 1 MHz of Cell = 1 MHz of other processors, which would also probably be wrong.

Oh, and some irony: all 3 next-gen consoles will be using some sort of POWER chip

POWER/PowerPC. Yes, very interesting. I expect the Xbox 2's processor will be more like current (non-Cell) PowerPC designs though. Just because.

 

[JackBurton]

85°C!!! Jesus!

What's wrong with 85°C? This is likely without a fan, at 4.6 GHz. As Wingznut suggests, there's no confirmation that the version of Cell in the PS3 will be at 4.6 GHz.

Because my Athlon XP or P4 would be a molten pile of goo at 85°C. Maybe it's different with this type of chip (it can stand more heat).

 

[Eug]

Because my Athlon XP or P4 would be a molten pile of goo at 85°C. Maybe it's different with this type of chip (it can stand more heat).

The maximum operating temperature of IBM's G5 970FX is 105°C I believe.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: JackBurton

85°C!!! Jesus!

What's wrong with 85°C? This is likely without a fan, at 4.6 GHz. As Wingznut suggests, there's no confirmation that the version of Cell in the PS3 will be at 4.6 GHz.

Because my Athlon XP or P4 would be a molten pile of goo at 85°C. Maybe it's different with this type of chip (it can stand more heat).

AMD AthlonXP datasheet
Intel P4 datasheet

AXPs are specced to operation at 85 degrees Celsius (some older models are even supposed to work at 90!). P4s are similar (70-75 degrees C, depending on model). Certainly you wouldn't have much overclocking headroom on an AXP at that temperature (and maybe a few chips would fail to operate properly at stock speeds at that point), but it would not "be a molten pile of goo". People freaking out because they're at 60 degrees C under full load are really not anywhere near the processor's temperature limits.

 

[jterrell]

It may hit 4.6 with extreme cooling and in a lab enviromenty but that means something like 3.5 MAX in production.
It should still be fairly sweet if you like console gaming.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: Eug

Because my Athlon XP or P4 would be a molten pile of goo at 85°C. Maybe it's different with this type of chip (it can stand more heat).

The maximum operating temperature of IBM's G5 970FX is 105°C I believe.

That's still a bit too "close to the edge", no?

 

[jm0ris0n]

Remember these temperatures are for core temps. Our sensors don't measure the absolute core.

 

[pm]

At ISSCC, specifications are often presented that are the absolute limit. Since it's a circuits conference, and not a product conference, people often show shmoo plots with the absolute limits of the circuitry.

Originally posted by: jm0ris0n
Remember these temperatures are for core temps. Our sensors don't measure the absolute core.

What's the difference between "core temps" and "absolute core"?

 

[bigal40]

3 3.5ghz processors is overkill unless the xbox 2 has some gpu that is about 3 generations ahead

 

[gururu]

Can't all these companies take a clue from AMD? GHz isn't always equal to performance!!

 

[klah]

Originally posted by: pm
At ISSCC, specifications are often presented that are the absolute limit. Since it's a circuits conference, and not a product conference, people often show shmoo plots with the absolute limits of the circuitry.

Originally posted by: jm0ris0n
Remember these temperatures are for core temps. Our sensors don't measure the absolute core.

What's the difference between "core temps" and "absolute core"?

He is probably referring to Tcase and Tjunction.

Tcase is the geometric center of the IHS and Tjunction is intenal and used by #thermtrip.

For the P4 these values are around 70C and 135C respectively.

 

[CSMR]

Originally posted by: pm

Originally posted by: jm0ris0n
Remember these temperatures are for core temps. Our sensors don't measure the absolute core.

What's the difference between "core temps" and "absolute core"?

jm0ris0n appears to be implying that they are the same thing, and different from what our sensors measure.

 

[BW86]

pretty cool

 

[Sureshot324]

So all three console's will use ibm processors?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Can't all these companies take a clue from AMD? GHz isn't always equal to performance!!

More then likely 'Cell' will be significantly faster then any PC part clock for clock. It is likely that the processor will be somewhere along the order of an order of magnitude faster then the fastest PC part when it ships. Based on KK's old comments the chip should have been pushing 6.6TFLOPS as it ships in the PS3, although I think 500GFLOPS will be closer to reality.

Of course, Sony needs at least that level of power as they will again go with an extremely basic rasterizer and rely on the CPU to handle most of the gfx heavy work. They are working the Stanford shading project in to the PS3 dev kits AFAIK, requiring massive amounts of computer power.

3 3.5ghz processors is overkill unless the xbox 2 has some gpu that is about 3 generations ahead

It depends on if you are interested in gaming or tech demos. If you want PC style tech demos where the visuals are ages ahead of the physics and AI then you would be correct. I personally would like to see some decent AI and a good world physics model included in a game(Source isn't remotely close to being a good world physics model). Also, with XB2 based on DX10 level technology you could say it is a couple of generations ahead of PC games at least. Outside of water shaders, we are pretty much still looking at DX8 level games today. WIth LCD a non factor on the console front we can expect DX10 level games out of the gate with XB2.

 

[RealityTime]

who cares :roll: whatever they come out with, latest pc hardware will still own it at the time of either the ps3 or xbox2 release