[patsu]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...=latin_america

Repsol YPF SA, Spain's largest oil company, is using chips that International Business Machines Corp. designed for video-game consoles to find oil in deep water as much as six times faster.

...

``Seventy-five percent of reserves are underwater and there are significant barriers because it is very hard to predict rock structures,'' said Srini Chari, an analyst with New York-based Cabot Partners, a research firm. The IBM technology lets companies survey regions that weren't accessible before, he said.

Working with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Repsol is using so-called reverse time migration, a technique for mapping subsurface rock structures, to study the Gulf of Mexico.

EDIT: Argh... copied the title and then realized that it should read "Cell Processor Help Repsol Find Deep Oil (Update 1)" (Mods, help !)

[AlStrong]

Cool.

"PowerXCell 8i " - Is that some fancy name for the regular 8SPE+1PPE configuration?

[patsu]

This one: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/640

[Panajev2001a]

Originally Posted by AlStrong

Cool.

"PowerXCell 8i " - Is that some fancy name for the regular 8SPE+1PPE configuration?

No, it indicates the DP enhanced variant... each SPE can now execute DP FP operations at a much higher throughput than before (now only only 0.5 so you get 25 .6 SP GFLOPS per SPE and 12.8 DP GFLOPS per SPE).

http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/cel...ay2008_pub.pdf

[Carl B]

@Alstrong - What's the PowerXCell 8i?

Great to see a big name putting the architecture to work in oil exploration. This gives us now some decent wins in several of the industries IBM is targeting with the architecture. Que bueno!

[scificube]

Cell has struck oil! Okay...not so much but it's nice to see another serious application of the Cell processor.