HotChips 17 - More info upcoming on CELL & PS3

[Jawed]

Good follow-up.

This bit:

* GPU write back to CPU is to indicate that the GPU is done reading data.

undoes what I was expecting, from earlier oh well. I was expecting this to be MEMEXPORT directly into L2.

Jawed

 

[pc999]

Thanks for the info.

 

[aldo]

RSX vs. Cell: Floating-Point Operations

Per Nvidia's chief scientist. David Kirk at EETimes:

In comments made before his talk, Kirk pointed out that the GeForce GPU chip used in the Playstation 3 offers significantly more floating-point operations per second than the Cell processor it supports.

Anyone see any significance in this statement? Would this be based on the Cell processor running on only the main PPU or the 7 SPEs as well? My guess would be that Kirk is basing this on his perception of the limited capabilities of the developers to exploit the Cell, but not being very tech savvy perhaps someone can enlighten me.

-Aldo

 

[scooby_dooby]

I don't think there's any signifigance in that statement. Nvidia says their GPU does 1.8TFLOPS.

a 3.2Ghz Cell does ~0.2 TFLOPS according to Sony and IBM.

 

[mistan]

If im not mistaken, the RSX was stated to have 1.8 G/Flops right? (including non programmable)
So that is significant.
That would also be why ps3 has *2T/Flops system performance*.

EDIT: scooby got to it 1st

 

[one]

Xbox 360 CPU = 165 million transistors (and presumably operates at 85 watts according to this interview)

and the GPU dice photo

 

[version]

 

[Colourless]

Xenon and PPE are rather similiar.

 

[PC-Engine]

Looks like MS could've added a 4th PPE and still kept the transistor count below a single PS3 CELL cpu.

 

[London Geezer]

Looks like MS could've added a 4th PPE and still kept the transistor count below a single PS3 CELL cpu.

Shame about yields huh. And developers are already unsure what to do with the 3rd core, god knows how long it would take them to find things to put on the 4th.

 

[PC-Engine]

Shame about yields huh. And developers are already unsure what to do with the 3rd core, god knows how long it would take them to find things to put on the 4th.

What are you talking about?

All cores in the XCPU are identical unlike the CELL. ;-)

There's no such thing as "Uh what should we do with the 3rd core?" The same code can run on ANY of the cores since they're all the same.

Oh and as far as yields are concerned how many transistors does CELL have compared to a 4-core XCPU?

 

[rabidrabbit]

I think l-b meant that as some have already expressed writing a three threaded code for a game to run effectively on a three core CPU is complicated enough, not to mention 4.
Or something like that, I know virtually nothing about programming so don't shoot me if I talk nonsense, shoot l-b.

 

[London Geezer]

What are you talking about?

All cores in the XCPU are identical unlike the CELL. ;-)

There's no such thing as "Uh what should we do with the 3rd core?" The same code can run on ANY of the cores since they're all the same.

What the heck are YOU talking about?
I didn't mean "what kind of core will MS put in there?", i specifically mentioned developers, meaning "what part of their software will DEVELOPERS dump on the 4th core, when it will take enough time for them to use the 3rd core properly?"

Read PCEngine, read.

 

[PC-Engine]

I think l-b meant that as some have already expressed writing a three threaded code for a game to run effectively on a three core CPU is complicated enough, not to mention 4.
Or something like that, I know virtually nothing about programming so don't shoot me if I talk nonsense, shoot l-b.

What he said is irrelevant since programmers will need to come to grips with it anyway. Guess how many cores CELL has? That's right 8 in total.

What the heck are YOU talking about?
I didn't mean "what kind of core will MS put in there?", i specifically mentioned developers, meaning "what part of their software will DEVELOPERS dump on the 4th core, when it will take enough time for them to use the 3rd core properly?"

Read PCEngine, read.

Completely irrelevant read above. You need to get up to date on what's happening right now and the future not what happened last year. Multithreading and muliprocessing is the future. Developers will find uses for all the cores/threads.

 

[one]

Looks like MS could've added a 4th PPE and still kept the transistor count below a single PS3 CELL cpu.

But that 4-core CPU is hotter than Prescott. Ouch.

 

[London Geezer]

What he said is irrelevant since programmers will need to come to grips with it anyway. Guess how many cores CELL has? That's right 8 in total.



Completely irrelevant read above. You need to get up to date on what's happening right now not last year.

Uhm i think you just need to chill, i was only replying to your comemnt about a 4th core. Not gonna happen anyway, so i replied with something that really shouldn't get your flames going the way it did.

Chill mate.

 

[PC-Engine]

But that 4-core CPU is hotter than Prescott. Ouch.

How much power does Prescott consume? Does Prescott need water cooling?

 

[one]

How much power does Prescott consume? Does Prescott need water cooling?

The TDP of Prescott is 103W @ 3.2Ghz.

 

[PC-Engine]

The TDP of Prescott is 103W @ 3.2Ghz.

At 23 watts per core and 16 watts for the L2 cache, a 4 core XCPU would be around 108 watts, not too bad. This got me thinking a 4 core CPU at 65nm would be pretty sweet and cheap too.

 

[Fafalada]

Looks like MS could've added a 4th PPE and still kept the transistor count below a single PS3 CELL cpu

Aren't the thermal characteristics already quite a bit worse then a 3.2Ghz Cell(especially 7:1Cell)? I'd be more worried about that then transistor counts(which are rather meaningless until we know the die-size).