PlayStation 3 Cell Chip Aims High

[Megadrive1988]

http://news.com.com/PlayStation+3+Cell+chip+aims+high/2100-1041_3-5563803.html?tag=nefd.top

Published: February 4, 2005, 11:20 AM PST
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
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Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba are set to provide fresh details on the Cell processor that will power the next version of Sony's PlayStation video game machine, but at least one analyst already has a pretty clear idea of what's coming.

Tom Halfhill of the Microprocessor Report has studied patents and other documents relating to Cell, which will be unveiled Monday at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. He sees a number of chip breakthroughs likely to dramatically boost computing power in everything from game machines to cell phones.

Chip giants such as Intel have already started working on dual-core chips, but Cell goes several steps further by giving processing units a measure of independence. Current multicore chips typically chop a single computing task into parts, which are distributed among processing units. Cell's processing units--called "software cells"--can handle completely separate jobs.

"The software cells are designed to be kind of self-contained--they can kind of roam around," Halfhill said.

Cells can even roam over a network, allowing the processor to perform a type of distributed or grid computing, an increasingly popular enterprise technique in which demanding tasks are divvied up among a gang of networked computers. A PlayStation 3 could borrow unused processing power from other consoles on a network, for example, to complete a demanding task such as delivering streaming video.

"The Cell architecture is designed to make grid computing almost universal," Halfhill said. "It makes distributed processing part of the design. If you have several of these machines on a network, the work can be spread across a network."

Cell also implements a number of on-the-chip security measures, mostly aimed at preventing unauthorized copying or distribution of copyright content, Halfhill said. Such functions typically are handled by software that sits on top of the chip, but Cell bakes security into the silicon with innovations such as a memory design that allocates memory into secure chunks. That way, only an authorized application can access a protected piece of content.

"A lot of (piracy) techniques rely on one application being able to access the same memory region as another application," Halfhill said. "With Cell, you can't do that because memory regions are locked down by the application."

The trick, Halfhill said, will be finding a way to implement such security measures without drastically undercutting chip performance. "What they're doing to fence off this memory requires a lot of memory access," he said. "It looks to me like a pretty cumbersome system. There's got to be some performance hit, and they're going to have to optimize the final design to get around that."

While PlayStation 3 will be the first major piece of hardware to use the Cell, the chip's designers have proposed a range of applications. Halfhill said it will take time for the market to sort out markets where the Cell design provides an advantage.

"They're pitching it as an architecture for everything--all the way down to cell phone and all the way up to servers," he said. "We've never seen one architecture that's good for such a wide range, so it may be a bit pie-in-the-sky on their part."

ISSCC cometh. STI bring it 8)

 

[Devourer]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/03/cell_analysis_part_two/

Let's add this too

 

[Guden Oden]

Do you guys think we can keep the cell discussions to no more than 95 separate threads please?

Some moderation - heavy-handed if neccessary - would be appreciated!

 

[nelg]

Published: February 4, 2005, 11:20 AM PST
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
TrackBack Print E-mail TalkBack

..............
"The software cells are designed to be kind of self-contained--they can kind of roam around," Halfhill said.

Cells can even roam over a network, allowing the processor to perform a type of distributed or grid computing, an increasingly popular enterprise technique in which demanding tasks are divvied up among a gang of networked computers. A PlayStation 3 could borrow unused processing power from other consoles on a network, for example, to complete a demanding task such as delivering streaming video.

"The Cell architecture is designed to make grid computing almost universal," Halfhill said. "It makes distributed processing part of the design. If you have several of these machines on a network, the work can be spread across a network."

I smell prior art

Transparent Distributed Processing
Transparent distributed processing provides a framework for the dynamic interconnection of hardware and software resources (message queues, file systems, services, databases) located on remote nodes, using standard messages. Processes running on a single CPU will continue to communicate with each other even if they are subsequently distributed among multiple CPUs, allowing developers to extend resources to networked nodes and simplify the development of multi-node systems.

With this unique capability, developers can create highly robust and fault-tolerant systems that can offer on-demand access to resources on multiple CPUs. If a CPU is not available, a similar resource can be transparently accessed on another CPU — delivering built-in redundancy and load balancing.


Transparent distributed processing replaces the traditional custom messaging infrastructure required to enable inter-process communications — saving time and costs associated with custom development and incremental hardware.

 

[Inane_Dork]

I smell prior art

I doubt IBM/Sony are the first to do this, true. But chances are that company is not the first to do it either. I kinda doubt they'll be taken to court over it.

And I have even stronger doubts about all this network/cell transparency being of any significant use in the PS3. Unless, of course, framerate doesn't matter at all.

 

[Phil]

Could we be seeing the first [performance] 'upgradable' console, ever? What if the software you buy have a requirement of how many PEs your PS3 has access to? What if, seperate PEs can obtained, either by purchasing Sony [CELL] products and connecting them -OR by special accessories that include a PE to be hooked up to the PS3?

Just some thoughts.... what I find more interesting about this thought, is how a fixed rasterizer or GPU (nVidia's part) would fit in when the number of PEs could be variable and anything from 2+n?

 

[McFly]

What if, seperate PEs can obtained, either by purchasing Sony [CELL] products and connecting them -OR by special accessories that include a PE to be hooked up to the PS3?

Exactly my thougths since the first cell announcements. Must be a Swiss thing.

Fredi

 

[Megadrive1988]

Could we be seeing the first [performance] 'upgradable' console, ever? What if the software you buy have a requirement of how many PEs your PS3 has access to? What if, seperate PEs can obtained, either by purchasing Sony [CELL] products and connecting them -OR by special accessories that include a PE to be hooked up to the PS3?

Just some thoughts.... what I find more interesting about this thought, is how a fixed rasterizer or GPU (nVidia's part) would fit in when the number of PEs could be variable and anything from 2+n?

technically this should certainly be possible but it will almost certainly never happen. at least not this way.

what we might see, in the coming years, is two or more PS3 connected together, directly (no internet) and specialty software, arcade games, flight simulators or demos written to take advantage of the extra processing power. but i doubt this will have any impact on the consumer PS3 video games.

 

[Megadrive1988]

Could we be seeing the first [performance] 'upgradable' console, ever? What if the software you buy have a requirement of how many PEs your PS3 has access to? What if, seperate PEs can obtained, either by purchasing Sony [CELL] products and connecting them -OR by special accessories that include a PE to be hooked up to the PS3?

Just some thoughts.... what I find more interesting about this thought, is how a fixed rasterizer or GPU (nVidia's part) would fit in when the number of PEs could be variable and anything from 2+n?

technically this should certainly be possible but it will almost certainly never happen. at least not this way.

what we might see, in the coming years, is two or more PS3 connected together, directly (no internet) and specialty software, arcade games, flight simulators or demos written to take advantage of the extra processing power. but i doubt this will have any impact on the consumer PS3 video games.