Recent content by ADEX

Funny, B3D regulars can usually find news in the most obscure sources imaginable, but Samsung licensing a GPU appears in an earnings release and it's apparently invisible. Go figure...

well, apart from: the network stack image decode font drawing / antialising and many standard C lib functions (memcopy, sort, search) see http://www.freevec.org/ I've seen a few times on B3D people who appear to be labouring under the assumption that vector units are only good for...

I found it somewhat unbelievable given the source. POWER7 will be in a big MCM in some configurations but in others it'll just be a normal chip in a normal package. However, the cores themselves don't appear to very big or power hungry and given they're likely considerably faster then the PPE...

Well there are some snippets of truth in there, even if they are just making things up. 1) Larrabee is rather less than likely to be the PS4 GPU. 2) POWER7 cores - the PowerXCell 32iv* was said to have 4 PPEs based on POWER7 technology. *Interestingly IBM only said the chip with 2PPEs...

Actually, there is a 4th option. Take Cell and add a couple of Power7 type cores, a bunch of SPEs and add in some Gfx specific stuff for texture filtering. Also add a "cache mode" to the local store. It'd be able to GPU stuff, GP stuff and anything in between. The PS4 could be a couple...

There seems to be an implicit idea that all the tasks SPEs do can be just moved over the GPUs. This isn't true, GPUS can only handle highly parallelisable tasks. If your task can't be split across thousands of threads, a GPU wont be of much use. CPUs on the other hand can do the same jobs a...

Power7 All this talk of POWER7 and what is in the PS4 is completely ignoring power consumption and cost. POWER7 is a 200W chip that is large and has huge memory and I/O busses. Cell on the other hand has all the top places on the Green500 list. It's fast, efficient and these days about 35W...

Reading around the web, IBM are denying it's the end. It's not clear what they are doing though. Interesting snippet in this one, don't know where it came from though: http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/11/24/ibm-denies-pulling-out-cell-development/1/

Could this really mean Cell is actually getting stronger? According to the original story only the 32i is getting canned, but the tech will continue and will be used elsewhere. It looks like the SPEs will be glued onto POWER or BlueGene machines. If that happens, wouldn't that mean POWER...

Probably because the story is flat out wrong. All that's been announced (by an IBM guy in an interview) it that PowerXCell32i (a chip that was never formally announced anyway) has been cancelled. That somehow got translated into IBM has cancelled Cell. He also said Cell will continue in...

The lack of coherence between the Local Stores is probably seen as a disadvantage but once you start to scale Cell it'll turn out to be a big advantage. Once you start adding in piles of cores coherent caches will become a major source of latency and power consumption.

But have they ended their program? What is this rumour based on? The next gen Cell wasn't due until next year and they have been talking about using it as an add-on to their bigger systems as an XML accelerator.

Saarland had real time raytracing on an FPGA years ago. A company called Caustic do a real time RT card card (also an FPGA). IBM have also shown real time software raytracing on 3 PS3s. Real time raytracing for games is not that far off, that someone might be working on it should be no...

I've heard of one company that petty much does things like that to get 1080p out of 720p hardware so I would put the chances of that being rather higher.

That's not quite true. OOO processors are really in-order processors with an OOO part in the middle. If you do a non-agressive OOO implementation - you're not going to do anything else on a mobile chip - it's not a complete redesign.