Does Cell = PPU in Physics Calculations?

So it is death-defyingly complex, far, far beyond even PS3's, XB2's, PPE's, or SPE's, which can be grasped via just a few bulletpoint specs? Ah-ha, I see...m'kay. It's "the wonderful thing"...it defies characterization via pipelines, processing units, clockrate, etc... It's terminology transcends all existing architectures that came before, such that it cannot be described in commonly understood computer terms... We only know what it will do if you use one...

 

Interviews with devs are irrelevent. I want to know how many SIMD ALU units, how it handles branches, what's its memory bus, cache, what clock rate, what macro ops does it have to accelerate physics? Etc. We know ZERO real info about this product.

You spend effort finding B3D links, and you link us to a site with aggregated links, but none of them are nothing but PR. No hard data.

Face it, nobody here knows how this chip works who isn't under NDA, and you can't provide any data nor explain it in your own words. So stop wiggling around. This has nothing to do with attacking you personally, it has to do with someone making unsubstantiated claims and refusing to provide evidence backing it up.

 

randy you just proved my point about u not reading anything that is posted. Way to go you made it on my ignore list . Which doesn't matter because you don't even read the posts that you responed to

Democoder - many people have already talked about the basics of the chips , what it is capable of and some of its workings . My links took me all of 5 seconds to find .

If you want to know anything else about it then wait till the nda is up . Then you can learn more about it or talk to people who know things and would trust you with.... never mind your posting history would make that kinda hard .

As for attacking me personaly thats all you've been doing for the last few days . Since i down bow down to sony or nvidia which seems to be your main thing in life .

Notice when I said the ppu would provide better physics than the cell and the x360 and pointed outthat the cell would be slightly better in regards to physics than the x360 you only called me a anti sony and not an anti ms .

Your own bias stains everything you say and it be laughable if it wasn't so ssad .


You and randycatt have destroyed this thread with your petty bias and grudges .

We were having a good converstation and you two had to bud in . Hopefully sonic or another mod can come around and clean the thread up

 

That's true, should be Ati & MS.

 

No it be sega , nintendo and powervr / video lodgic if you followed posts

Be hard to bow down to ms when I don't even own an xbox

 

Well, current XBox has a NV chip in it, the next Ati.. And then it's your signature

And i have been following your posts..

 

ah okay . So the reasons why i owned every nvidia card up to the geforce 2 ?


as for my sig there will be one for the psp and ns5 when they are avalible for awhile there was the psp one but i completed and got my free one . I actually personaly owned 2 till one was stolen (the other has a battery problem)

What you don't know can basicly fill up an ocean

then follow closer .

 

Woo hoo , JVD vs Democoder+ Randycat. Place your bets now. Ima gonna grab some popcorn for the front row seats...........

 

Ok, so it's just anti Nvidia then ?

That's unfortunetly true. Luckily i'm not allown with that limitation.

 

"pop a 6800U into your PC and you will be capable of runnign the same graphics as a PS2 and xbox".

Does that mean a PS2 and xbox are capable of the same graphics as a 6800U?

No.

And so ATI's words don't mean the PS3 and X360 will be capable of the same level of physics as a PPU.

Maybe they will, who knows? But saying they will or they won't is no worse than what most people in here are assuming about the X360's and Cells CPU superiority over current PC's. We all know theoretical CPU Gflops mean practically nothing to gaming performance but it seems as though some people are blinded by them.

 

My thought at the minute:

Cell > X360 > PC (dual core)

I've no idea where the PhysX chip will fit in, but I'm hoping it'll best them all (i'm a PC upgrade whore - or a chump, whichever you prefer - and I'd like a new credible upgrade path to follow if it means better experiences )

BTW, there's two seperate quotes re. Cell and Physx from Epic - one from Mark Rein, one from Sweeney. I don't think either has any vested interest in Cell (if anything, they'd be closer to AGEIA), so I'd be inclined to trust their comment. Rein threw in X360 at the end of his comment (and with nothing like the same focus as he had on Cell vs Physx), but Sweeney solely compared Cell to Physx in his comment.

It wouldn't exactly be shocking to see PS3's CPU be better for physics than X360's, would it? It's one of the target workloads for IBM, they had demos at E3 with non-interpenetrating cloth simulation, and online games with server side physics processing on Cell. It should be rather beastly for physics judging by how they're pitching it and dev comments sofar (well Epic's anyway), even if it's a little harder to harness.

 

I doubt the physx/aigea/whatevah chip can best the cell, from the presentation and from deano's comments of Heavenly Sword, it seems that using the single core and few if any spus the cell can run virtually any kind of game. Leaving the bulk of it's processing power for this kinda stuff. With a design to deal with power/heat issues, high clock-rate, nice memory setup, and years of experience and design by some of the top eng.s in the world... I doubt it can be beat by a simpler product(most likely lower clocked) using an older process.

 

I think we should wait and see. So far Tim Sweeney has said that a PC with a PPU will be able to handle all the physics of X360 and PS3 games. That suggests its at least as powerful as either of those.

The fact that its nearly as large as the Cell in transistor terms yet is built from the ground up specifically for physics calculations while the Cell has to be far more generalised will give it the advantage IMO.

 

Nearly as in half as much?

And what a built from ground up IC dedicated to physic calulations is so much different from a heavily multi threaded CPU.

I agree completely with the points Democoder made in this thread about the Ageia chip. All this PPU craze is, for the moment being, only due to marketing babble.
And therefore, I don't see how anyone could start comparing this PPU with anything else, let alone praise its usefulness.

 

Does anybody who has read jvd's "top 10 links on the PPU" care to share some hardware tidbits they have gleaned from the reading? clockrate? number of cores? DSP involved? SIMD's? pipelines? Based on any existing general CPU cores that we know of? Do you program at it like a videocard or do you have to go machine language on it? Anything?...

 

From what I gather, it's gonna be included in the Phantom. :? PEACE.

 

Godammit that Phantom is going to rawk everything!!!

Now don't spread this around...but I have it on word this PPU thingamajig is going run...on...












[whispers] electricity

I'm pretty sure on this, but there is also talk of another process where milk is transmorphed on-die into GFLOPs. Now that is extreme speculation, for sure, but can you imagine the ramifications?!?! I'd be buying some serious stock on cows right now, if I knew for sure...

 

Whoops, I was thinking of the X360 CPU transistor count, not the Cell.

Yes there would be differences. Or are you suggesting that the PPU could act in the same capacity as Cell?

Of course not. One is much more general purpose than the other and all other things being equal, specialisation = faster.

 

Physics is just a whole bunch of floating point calculations, and you don't have to upload the whole scene to Cell like with a stand-alone PPU, over a slow bus. With Cell, you can integrate the physics with the other calculations, which almost certainly removes a large overhead.

 

So why not just build a cell like device onto a board and call it a PPU? Given the price of the PPU and the required cost of a Cell to go in a console, it would be more than financially viable.

Bottom line, if Cells more powerful than a PPU then why did Tim say that with a PPU, PC's could have all the physics of PS3 games?

With an NV2a, can the xbox have all the graphics of a high end PC?