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Sony Cell Chip

C

clarkey01

Diamond Member
Is the sony cell CPU really as powerful as they make on ? I read a quote saying 1000 fold processing power increase, just hype ?

Also the rumor that xbox2 will have a 3.5 Ghz G5 in it ? arnt IBM stcuk @ 2.5 Ghz (water cooled) G5 in the mac ?



Cheers
 
Originally posted by: clarkey01
Is the sony cell CPU really as powerful as they make on ? I read a quote saying 1000 fold processing power increase, just hype ?

Also the rumor that xbox2 will have a 3.5 Ghz G5 in it ? arnt IBM stcuk @ 2.5 Ghz (water cooled) G5 in the mac ?



Cheers
Click to expand...

Sony hyped up the PS2s cpus abilities as well, saying it was 1000x as powerful as any home pc out today (at the time).
 
You, senior boy, know better than to cross-post... But we'll let it slide, since this is where the thread should be anyways. (I read this same thread in Off-Topic).

My opinion? WE SHALL SEE. Remember PS2 and "Emotion Engine"?
 

My opinion? WE SHALL SEE. Remember PS2 and "Emotion Engine"?
[/quote]

I just think that they never got the best of it , I had a look @ GT4 and it looked amazing, far better then GT3. But this cell CPU has had billions spent on it and a 5 year development, its massive. But i'll have to wait and see
 
Sony is the master of marketing and hype.

Microsoft did impress me with the Xbox specs. Xbox was very powerful machine at the time of the launch.

Both machines are still long ways off. Wake me up when both are released.
 
Originally posted by: clarkey01
Is the sony cell CPU really as powerful as they make on ? I read a quote saying 1000 fold processing power increase, just hype ?

Also the rumor that xbox2 will have a 3.5 Ghz G5 in it ? arnt IBM stcuk @ 2.5 Ghz (water cooled) G5 in the mac ?



Cheers
Click to expand...

From what i understood, both have 3 powerpc cores in them, but the cell has other things integrated. I could be wrong though.

Also, 2.8 ghz is supposed to be coming out soon, and we still have another year to go, and 65nm. It's entirely possible, although it will probably be very spendy.
 
I'm convinced all the stuff about cell is mostly hype, especially after reading this article right here.. http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html

So much of it is based around being cheap, which I doubt it will be. 5 years of research and a brand new fab to use your brand new 65nm process takes A LOT of money (even if you have someone like sony paying your bills), not to mention all the recent troubles with *high speed* 90nm parts in recent days.

Aside from that, it seems like it really will be a good architecture, probably put today's (and the ones around at it's release) to shame by a good margin. Will anything (outside of ps3) come of it? I doubt it. There's no software written for it, there's no one outside of ibm/sony who knows HOW to write software for it, and, the biggest factor, it's all going to need to be written in machine code until someone takes the time to write a c/c++ compiler for it. Hell, that might not even be possible given that the whole point of the architecture is to keep things fast. Maybe someone will write a decently abstracted HLL for the cell architecture, but still, that takes time and ibm doesn't seem interested in it.

Meh, that's my take on it.
 
From the Blachford article:

The first Cell based desktop computer will be the fastest desktop computer in the industry by a very large margin. Even high end multi-core x86s will not get close. Companies who produce microprocessors or DSPs are going to have a very hard time fighting the power a Cell will deliver. We have never seen a leap in performance like this before and I don't expect we'll ever see one again, It'll send shock-waves through the entire industry and we'll see big changes as a result.
Click to expand...

This is a 9 core processor, one of these cores is something similar to a PowerPC G5 and acts as a controller. The remaining 8 cores are called APUs and these are very high performance vector processors. Each APU contains it's own block of high speed RAM and is capable of 32 GigaFlops (32bit). The APUs are independent processors and can act alone or can be set up to process a stream of data with different APUs working on different stages. This ability to act as a "stream processor" gives access to the full processing power of a Cell which is more than 10 times higher than even the fastest desktop processors.
Click to expand...

Design is rarely the same as reality, but one can always hope...
 
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