New article on Cell (good!)

[Titanio]

"Holy Chip!

IBM's radical Cell processor, to debut in Sony's PlayStation 3, could reshape entertainment and spark the next high-tech boom."

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0130/076.html

I haven't even finished reading it, but already there's some nice new info in there, including new customers for Cell (Raytheon, for missile systems, Stanford University for a supercomputer), and a comment from Pandemic Studios on it etc.

BM reckons Cell, potent and versatile, can do a lot more than just play games. It sees a role for it in mobile phones, handheld video players, high-definition televisions, car design and more. Scientists at Stanford University are building a Cell-based supercomputer. Toshiba plans to use the superchip in TV sets, which one day could let fans watch a football game from multiple camera angles they control. Raytheon is set to use Cell in missile systems, artillery shells and radar. Other companies envision new high-definition medical imaging. "Cell is the next step in the evolution of the microprocessor. It's a peek into the future," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer at Mercury Computer Systems, which makes medical and military systems and is taking orders for Cell servers.

By early last year Sony was sending out Cell prototypes and software tools to get developers started on writing new games for PlayStation 3. "We're seeing stuff that goes dramatically beyond what we can do with the current generation [of games]," says Andrew Goldman, chief executive of Pandemic Studios, a Los Angeles outfit that wrote a series of popular Star Wars games for PlayStation 2. "And what you will see over time is going to be even more amazing." He says it will take years to fully exploit Cell's capabilities.

The good news: Some designers say creating games for Cell is far less complicated than writing for PlayStation 2. "Anyone who worked on the PlayStation 2 is jumping for joy," says Jeremy Gordon, chief executive of Secret Level, a gamemaker in San Francisco that is remaking a classic 1980s Sega videogame for the new Sony box.

He and Kahle have visited more than 50 companies, enduring abundant skepticism from jaded industry veterans--until they ran their speedy Cell demos. "It's just amazing to go meet with people who have been in the industry for 25 years and just see their jaws drop," Kahle says. When a famous chip designer, a veteran of Motorola and Apple, visited Austin for a demo in 2004, Kahle showed him images from the Mount Rainier flyover, eliciting stunned silence. "He just got really quiet," as he realized "what this is going to do to the industry," Kahle says.

Mercury, which sells modules for medical gear made by General Electric, Philips and Siemens, says Turismo could make a CT scanner so fast that it will be able to paint a 3-D image in four seconds versus five minutes on an Intel Pentium. Mercury is even pushing Cell to firms that create computer-generated special effects for movies. "This chip is opening doors for us," says Joel Radford, a Mercury vice president.

The PlayStation hook inspires confidence at Raytheon, the Waltham, Mass. defense contractor, which has studied Cell for 15 months and plans to use it in scores of next-generation systems. "Sonar, infrared sensors--there are hundreds of products that Raytheon designs that could use this type of technology," says Peter Pao, chief technology officer. "Current chips are going to run out of steam. We always look to the future."

 

[scooby_dooby]

link's broken

 

[Edge]

Article seems to be missing, and I see other articles on the site are producing the same 404 error. Hopefully it comes back.

 

[Titanio]

Is the link working now? It seems to be working for me. Really nice 3-pager there. It's dated for 30 Jan, though, so maybe it wasn't meant to be up yet! I've the whole thing saved, but I've put choice quotes in the original post.

 

[Edge]

The page is probably still in your cache. I can find the link to the article on their website entitled "Holy Chip!", but get the same 404 error.

Thanks for the quotes!

 

[Heian-kyo]

The whole article is up now Titanio (gofreak too right?). Good read indeed.

Interesting tidbit that is somewhat related: 6 years ago today is when Sony announced details on the February PlayStation Conference for the PS2.

Announcement imminent?

 

[Titanio]

Well, here are more quotes in the mean time! Not sure if I should copy and paste the whole thing..there are 3 pages worth..

Cell's creators needed to strike a balance between raw power and the versatility to do more than just play games. Special graphics chips are superspeedy, but for only one task. General-purpose chips like those made by Intel devote a lot of muscle to the ability to handle a wide variety of jobs, but they aren't superfast at any one of them. For two decades Intel boosted performance by cramming more transistors onto a chip, but now chips draw so much power and generate so much heat that they can't be cranked up much more. Intel and others boost performance by lashing together two or more thinking elements on a single chip. Intel makes dual-core chips. Sun's Niagara boasts eight cores. For Microsoft's Xbox 360, IBM linked three Power cores. But even these multicore chips will not be powerful enough to drive the next wave, Kahle argues. Cell needed an entirely new design.

Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's lead designer on Cell, says Sony aims to use this power to create movies that are interactive and changeable, with multiple story lines, so people will watch the same flick more than once. Another idea Sony is kicking around: placing ads in the background of movies and TV shows and customizing them to suit the viewer, with Cell processors keeping track of who sees what.

Breakthrough chips easily inspire such big ideas, but Cell enjoys a running start that previous chips didn't have. It is likely to end up in millions upon millions of homes around the world as the PlayStation 3 rolls out. Once these Cells throb away in game consoles, TV sets and set-top boxes, they can be fed digital fare by new networks of Cell-based servers. "As the clients become very powerful, then the servers will have to become very powerful, too," Kahle says.

edit - it's up for everyone now? cool.

 

[DemoCoder]

I like CELL, but CELL is not the future IMHO, it is 1/2 of the future. I think the future is the combination of throughput style designs like the Niagara chip, and "SPE farm" approach of CELL, that is, lots of additional TLP combined with a large pool of functional units. If you're going to go the route of dropping OoOE and ILP scalability, you need TLP to make up for stalls.


That will hold us over until we get RSFQ and nanorod based designs.

 

[Nicked]

It seems the CELL is getting more applications that the Emotion Engine could ever dream of. Probably due to IBMs strong backing.
The more you hear that independant companies are interested/impressed the further away from "EE hype all over again" it becomes.

I do think that aspects of CELL design will be amalgamated into other chips (CELL-esque architectures have already been on others roadmaps of course), and CELL could possibly be viewed in hindsight as a catalyst for the next-generation of mainstream (for home) processors.

In and of itself it probably won't achieve incredible commercial success due to the limited scope of its suited applications.

 

[Guden Oden]

Hm. Raytheon. Scary company that.

Seems the bogus reports of Saddam buying PS2s to rebuild into missile warhead computers were enough to jolt the military-industrial complex enough to decide that when PS3 arrives, THEY be the first to make weapons of mass destruction out of them!

 

[RavenFox]

You go Cell

 

[Kabbage]

I can see the forbes thing just fine

Thanks

 

[MfA]

Ugh, their site seems incompatible with firefox ... I can see it with IE.

 

[one]

Cheers Titanio a great article!
Well what it describes is almost too good to be true so let's just see how it can actualize in the long haul.

Now which 80's classic SEGA game will be a remake by Secret Level? Afterburner?

 

[one]

Ugh, their site seems incompatible with firefox ... I can see it with IE.

I can browse it with Firefox/1.6a1.

 

[Edge]

The article came back up, so it was not a Firefox issue.

Nice article, even though it is a bit on the sensational side.

Now can anyone figure out what game SEGA produced in the 80's where SEGA would hire an outside company to work on? 80's would put it even before the Genesis I think. I doubt it one of their stronger franchises, as SEGA tends to keep those for inhouse development, even though some Sonic titles where developed outside the company.

 

[Nicked]

Now can anyone figure out what game SEGA produced in the 80's where SEGA would hire an outside company to work on?

Zaxxon.

Make it happen Sega.

 

[overclocked]

The article came back up, so it was not a Firefox issue.

Nice article, even though it is a bit on the sensational side.

Now can anyone figure out what game SEGA produced in the 80's where SEGA would hire an outside company to work on? 80's would put it even before the Genesis I think. I doubt it one of their stronger franchises, as SEGA tends to keep those for inhouse development, even though some Sonic titles where developed outside the company.

These is from the Mastersytems and early Arcade days hmmm..
I maybe are going to mix between cause i dont remember but Strider, SpaceHarrier...?

 

[liverkick]

These is from the Mastersytems and early Arcade days hmmm..
I maybe are going to mix between cause i dont remember but Strider, SpaceHarrier...?

Secret Level's website describes it as a Sega IP "historically unavailable to western developers".

 

[cam]

I'm sure Strider was Capcom, the only Sega games i can think of that came from outside of Sega Japan were Fantasia and Toe Jam and Earl.

Its good that STI has some uses for cell outside of the ps3 already, but getting used outside of dedicated hardware and games consoles may be tougher, maybe bundling Linux with the ps3 hard drive would be a nice way to introduce people to the system, especially if the hard drive came with the system.

Which is why this quote from ign seems strange "the PlayStation 3 also nestles some pretty expensive technology -- not the least of which are Blu-Ray support and a built-in hard drive" in there Cnn - ps3=$500 write up. I thought a hard drive as standard was just a rumour?