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Monday, February 07 2005

Cell Processor Details  by Craig D at 23:54

PCPlaystation
IBM, Sony and Toshiba have today begun releasing more information about their upcoming joint venture CELL processor, said to be much faster than the current best of class x86 CPU's. And Tom's Hardware have some of the detail.

The prototype shown at the conference is based on Power architecture, integrates nine cores and runs at "more than 4 GHz".

That's faster than even intel's rather hot prescott Pentium 4 CPU currently tops out.

The basic structure of the chip is comprised out of one 64-bit PowerPC chip and eight "synergistic processing units" (SPEs), the firms said. The PowerPC processor will integrate 32 kByte L1 and 512 kByte L2 cache, while the SPEs will use 256 KByte cache.

I personally would quite like more information about these 'synergistic processing units', quite how complex are they? What are they capable of?

There's a lot more details in article on Tom's Hardware should this sort of thing be up your street. Those of you who prefer to wait, might not have to wait all that long, the Cell chip is due to be used in Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console.
Comments
Mani
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08 February 2005 10:31
More blurb from the press release.

SUMMARY:

# Cell is a breakthrough architectural design - featuring 8 Synergistic Processing Units (SPU) with Power-based core, with top clock speeds exceeding 4 GHz (as measured during initial laboratory testing).

# Cell is OS neutral - supporting multiple operating systems simultaneously

# Cell is a multicore chip comprising 8 SPUs and a 64-bit Power processor core capable of massive floating point processing

# Special circuit techniques, rules for modularity and reuse, customized clocking structures, and unique power and thermalmanagement concepts were applied to optimize the design

CELL is a Multi-Core Architecture

# Contains 8 SPUs each containing a 128 entry 128-bit register file and 256KB Local Store

# Contains 64-bit Power ArchitectureTM with VMX that is a dual thread SMT design-views system memory as a 10-way coherent threaded machine

# 2.5MB of on Chip memory (512KB L2 and 8 * 256KB)

# 234 million transistors
Tricky
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08 February 2005 10:37
Sounds very clever but also a bit risky for the ps3.
Mani
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08 February 2005 10:40
Gonna take a while for games programmers to get used to coding for so many cores.

Still, the cenrtal main core is more or less a standard Power4/5 CPU, very similar to the ones used in the new Xbox, interesting eh?
Tricky
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08 February 2005 19:47


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