Panajev2001a
Veteran
How do you utilsed the performance than ?
How ? Well, by doing what I wrote in the rest of the post...
It is true when we write code ( write != compile ) we do not think about the processing speed of the machine and what we worry about is synchronization of the different APUs and different parts of the task we are executing, etc...
We basically synchronize on the absolute timer... "timer fires => APU is woken up => result is expected" sounds like multi-tasking on a modern OS, but with some of its mechanism ( of the process/task/thread scheduler ) built in HW or so it seems...
As I wrote at the beginning of this message I do believe that in the code we have a way of specifying the speed of the CPU: how else could we talk about code written "for an older/slower APU" running on a "newer/faster APU"... this also implies we can write code that gets compiled in such a way we can define it as being "tailored for a newer/faster APU"...
What changes should the amount of operations you can do for each task...
If you know you are writing code for a 8 GHz Cell device and we assume the time slice given by the absolute timer has been remaining the same since the first Cell ( "the time slice given by the absolute timer will not change" ) than we will know ( and the compiler will too ) that we can fit more work in each time slice offered by the absolute timer so that we can reach a higher level of utilization for our HW ( we are not interested about power consumption, in this example, but about performance ).
You rightly wondered what I meant by a simple Cell chip for Cell based TVs...
I read an article on EETimes magazine yonks ago, it was a Toshiba engineering talking about TV of the future. One of the point I remember was that in Sports like Football, they wanted to let the viewer to be able to replay a goal, from different angels, and one way to do this is to recreate the scene in 3D, and let the viewer manipulate it in real time. He estimates that it requires something around 8 billion polygon/s to get something somewhat realistic.
So I don't know why you think TV would not need such a fast chip is beyond me.
Remember high end TV has alot of margins, they can include state of the art chip in there.
I am sorry, my analisys was confined to medium-low to medium-high priced TVs and not $12k HDTVs so I was not going to think about multi-billions polygons per second...
8 billions polygons/s... uhm... a bit high even for the mighty PS3... say 200-400 MPolygons/s and I'd say maybe
Still, maybe we will see more powerful than PS3 chipsets powering very high-end TVs in the future.. maybe they will play PS3 games as well... who knows...
You asked about Linux... well I think Linux is good enough... more than good enough to serve as the basis for Cell OS...
Sony is quite fond of Linux, but IBM is even more and their multi-billion dollars investment in Linux related R&D ( you can do a simple search at IBM's website and you will find quite a good amount of links ) and you will see why Linux could really have a future in Sony, IBM and Toshibas plans