If emotion engine = 6 GFlops at 300 Mhz. EE at 4 Ghz ????

[Love_In_Rio]

Wouldn´t be in the range of 80 GFlops ? And, thus, Sony making a little variations of the chip couldn´t have reached the theorical computational power of the Xenon CPU ?

 

[ERP]

I suspect that your average hardware engineer would consider scalinmg the clock from 300MHz to 4GHz to be more than a minor tweak.

 

[Lazy8s]

Clocking it that high may not be practical without extensive changes. Those variations may not leave it looking like the same processor anymore.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

But considering the number of trannies in the Emotion Engine, scaling it in 0.09 process couldn´t be so difficult to reach that clock frequency

 

[Vaan]

I suspect that your average hardware engineer would consider scalinmg the clock from 300MHz to 4GHz to be more than a minor tweak.

Just a bit of voltage should work fine

 

[sunscar]

That would only be if the chip stayed with the same number of transistors and the same die size and the same silicon process though. How many EEs could be placed side by side in a parallel configuration with the techniques used today though? Enough to smash through the 80Gflops barrier quite easily, if it were to run at such a high clock speed.

 

[Carl B]

Re: If emotion engine = 6 GFlops at 300 Mhz. EE at 4 Ghz ???

Wouldn´t be in the range of 80 GFlops ? And, thus, Sony making a little variations of the chip couldn´t have reached the theorical computational power of the Xenon CPU ?

I've been told that the Cell chip is actually the spiritual successor of the Emotion Engine in a lot of ways. Not knowing enough about it to get into it, I'll leave it at that. Also of course, the Cell brings to the table it's ease of scalability.

 

[Spidermate]

Re: If emotion engine = 6 GFlops at 300 Mhz. EE at 4 Ghz ???

Wouldn´t be in the range of 80 GFlops ? And, thus, Sony making a little variations of the chip couldn´t have reached the theorical computational power of the Xenon CPU ?

I've been told that the Cell chip is actually the spiritual successor of the Emotion Engine in a lot of ways. Not knowing enough about it to get into it, I'll leave it at that. Also of course, the Cell brings to the table it's ease of scalability.

Actually, I heard from one of the insiders that Cell and EE have very little in common.

 

[Carl B]

Re: If emotion engine = 6 GFlops at 300 Mhz. EE at 4 Ghz ???

edited by moderator:

Or you can decide not to go off topic and stay on topic. 1st warning.

 

[Lazy8s]

There's no compatibility between the Emotion Engine and Cell processor families apparently, but they do share some similar design ideologies like shortcutting the rounding results in single-precision floating point computations.

 

[Acert93]

One of those more knowledgable in CELL can correct me (Jaws, Pana, V, One, etc...) but the SPEs (APUs) on CELL seem to be an evolution of the *idea* behind the Vector units in the EE. Obviously there are quite a few differences, but they also seem to have a bit in common.

That said the CELL currently has a PPC core and seems to be designed around the concept of flexiblity in the number of SPEs used and the XDR (and EIB) technology that is able to keep the high powered SPEs fueled with information to crunch. So even if a concession is made on any similarities shared between the Vectors units in the EE and the CELL SPEs, you would still be forced to conclude the two chips are quite different most ways although sharing some evolutionary tangents, but I am not an expert. I am sure if I am incorrect someone will come in and correct me

 

[Carl B]

Thank you Lazy8s and Acert - exactly what I'm talking about. 8)

Now, keep in mind I never said 'based on the same architecture,' I said 'spiritual successor.'

I was just trying to get across that Sony had a vision of the evolution of the EE before they went over to IBM, and the Cell more or less is the product of the EE experience/vision they brought to the table.

 

[Megadrive1988]

That would only be if the chip stayed with the same number of transistors and the same die size and the same silicon process though. How many EEs could be placed side by side in a parallel configuration with the techniques used today though? Enough to smash through the 80Gflops barrier quite easily, if it were to run at such a high clock speed.

The GSCube which used 16 Emotion Engines, basicly the same ones as in PS2, already smashed through the 80Gflop barrier since it's rated at 97.5 Gflops

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/pc/docs/article/20000726/gscube.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/26/sony_aims_emotion_engine_tech/
http://www.vr-zone.com/Home/news53/
http://www.gamasutra.com/newswire/bit_blasts/20000725/index4.htm


and there was also a 64 EE, 64 GS (I-32) version of GSCube
http://www.gamasutra.com/newswire/bit_blasts/20000725/index4.htm

and although the flops performance of this version was not listed AFAIK, it would've provided 390 Gflops (97.5 * 4) or 396.8 Gflops (6.2 * 64)


heh, I am waiting to see if Playstation3 CPU beats the 64 EE GSCube

 

[Li Mu Bai]

Not meaning to stray, but refresh my memory here. What were the GFLOPS ratings of the XBX & GC respectively? I know that the PS2 was ahead, almost doubling the XBX iirc. (3.5?) But all this focus & obsession is not a correct way to gauge & assess comprehensive system strength imo, didn't this generation demonstrate this? Now next-gen with such a leap it will come into play, but there are still so many other factors involved, so many aspects to consider.

 

[Simon F]

I suspect that your average hardware engineer would consider scalinmg the clock from 300MHz to 4GHz to be more than a minor tweak.

I would think that an expert hardware engineer would consider it rather unpleasant

 

[Panajev2001a]

I suspect that your average hardware engineer would consider scalinmg the clock from 300MHz to 4GHz to be more than a minor tweak.

I would think that an expert hardware engineer would consider it rather unpleasant

I would think that a Senior expert hardware engineer would consider how you would look stuffed in his trophy collection .