Super Cell (CELL insider talks to Forbes)

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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/fo/20050127/bs_fo/e77d9f1fe84a7208eec1dd0d6df251c4

Super Cell

Thu Jan 27, 6:34 PM ET

By Benjamin Fulford David Whelan

One of the most gossiped-about and eagerly awaited technologies of 2005 is a powerful microprocessor called Cell. Produced by a consortium of Sony, Toshiba and IBM, Cell will be the brains of the next-generation Sony PlayStation 3, due out in 2006. If its builders' advance hype is right, Cell promises a new era of graphics-rich computers, as well as TVsets and home theaters capable of processing and moving large volumes of high-definition content. "Cell will make possible a transformation in entertainment like that from novels to movies,"says Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment. Technical details will be released Feb. 6 at a conference in San Francisco.

We've managed to glean some inside tidbits. A single Cell chip is expected to be capable of surpassing 250 billion floating point operations, or 250 gigaflops, per second, rivaling the best mid-1990s supercomputer. In flops, it is six times as fast as Nvidia's new graphics chip.

"It is so fast there is no point talking about the number," says a Cell engineer who spoke with FORBES on the condition of anonymity. "The beauty is in its flexibility."Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before.

Each Cell chip will have between eight and ten separate processing cores on one piece of silicon (a final decision is pending), compared to two for the latest Pentium chips.

Intel is watching Cell warily, but Intel spokesman Howard High says that while the chip may be successful in videogame consoles, he doubts it would reverberate beyond into the realm of PC computers. "The Japanese tend to shoot high in terms of their goals. So far they haven't had a successful general-purpose microprocessor," says High.

The Cell chip will go into production by midyear at IBM's East Fishkill, N.Y. wafer factory. Sony and IBM have announced plans for a workstation combining multiple Cells that, acting in concert, will reach 16 trillion flops, ranking alongside the world's top ten supercomputers. It will be aimed at engineers and Hollywood animators. This figure is "probably a p.r. exaggeration," the Cell engineer says, but future workstations containing racks of 32 chips will be able to attain this speed. Toshiba has plans for a Cell-based hi-def TVset in 2006.

Cell's big public debut will likely wow conference attendees with very fast graphics and multimedia applications on a prototype computer. "You couldn't imagine how fast it will be," says the inside engineer. "It will be able to make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff needed to produce such quality,"he says.

One surprise, says the engineer, would be if Cell lives up to the rumor going around the development team that the consortium is on its way to production using advanced 65-nanometer technology, in which transistors are squeezed even closer together than the 90-nanometer production process that Intel uses and that the Cell consortium has claimed to have been using so far. The denser a chip's transistors, the more powerful the chip can be. "For Intel, it would be a big shock," promises the engineer.

Hmm, the green light for multiple PEs in a 65nm Cell...? ;)
 
You know, even if PS3 is a dud, even if no one will buy it, at least Sony will have DBZ fans buying it just for the names....

Super Cell ||| Frieza Bu Edition pack will sell like hotcakes...
 
one said:
Hmm, the green light for multiple PEs in a 65nm Cell...? ;)

So is this a confirmation that one PE @ 90nm will be capable of 256GFlops? That would sure make a 2PE or even a 4PE chip possible at 65nm aka up to 1TFlop!

Fredi
 
so that means what for the microchip ignorant dumb here like me?
that the performance advantage can be maintained for 5 years over current X86 pc technnology?
is moores law cracked? can we simulate our own nuclear tests at home ?
 
My favourite quotes:

"Cell, he says, will be able to link millions of people into a vibrant, lifelike virtual community on a scale never seen before."

What? Like The Matrix?

"It will be able to make movie-quality graphics without any of the tricky engineering stuff needed to produce such quality,"he says.

Damn that "tricky engineering stuff"! :LOL:
 
It's interesting they are still "talking" about having workstations. Shouldn't those be a reality by now, based on comments from previous press releases??
 
one said:
Each Cell chip will have between eight and ten separate processing cores on one piece of silicon (a final decision is pending), compared to two for the latest Pentium chips.

Are they just saying here - 1 PPC core + 8 APUs? 9 cores? Where would 10 come from?

one said:
Cell's big public debut will likely wow conference attendees with very fast graphics and multimedia applications on a prototype computer.

So we may get an actual demo on a physical computer at the ISSCC rather than just papers/slides? I'm wondering what kind of graphics demo they could do without wandering into PS3 territory - perhaps a realtime "adaptation" of a famous CG movie scene aka the FF or Antz GS demos? That would be so nice....but I should stop letting my imagination run away with itself ;)
 
Mariner said:
My favourite quotes:


What? Like The Matrix?

Yep. Better run before u're turned into a battery.

Damn that "tricky engineering stuff"! :LOL:

Yeah, with PS3 devs will be able to produce FFTSW type of graphics without having to worry about doing anything. Cell workstations will do it for them. 5 years development of FFTSW was all a waste. They should have waited for the Cell workstations, clicked on "FFTSW: CREATE" and go have a coffee.
 
Titanio said:
Are they just saying here - 1 PPC core + 8 APUs? 9 cores? Where would 10 come from?
One of the first CELL related patent claimed that a CELL cpu could be built with an additional APU, in order to have a fully functional chip even if a single APU is defective.

ciao,
Marco
 
Great. We get to hear Emotion Engine hype all over again.
Second verse, same as the first.


(Though I do expect Cell to be much more important to computing than the EE ever was.)
 
london-boy said:
You know, even if PS3 is a dud, even if no one will buy it, at least Sony will have DBZ fans buying it just for the names....

Super Cell ||| Frieza Bu Edition pack will sell like hotcakes...

Just bought 12.
 
"Cell will make possible a transformation in entertainment like that from novels to movies,"says Ken Kutaragi

Riiiiiiight Ken. I think MS and Nintendo need to take lessons from this guy. While this is GREAT stuff for the mainstream press and mainstream consumers to get them excited it really turns me off. CELL is an AWESOME piece of technology and deserves hype and attention. But this is the entire EE thing all over again. While CELL is gonna kick some serious butt, I think the Xenon design is not gonna be some wimp either. And it seems the MS offering from what we know will be pretty flexible and be a very good general computing device. So PS3 is brute power and Xenon looks to be more general purpose. Mark it now: Whoever creates the platform that is the most flexible, accessible, and affordable is going to reach the most developers. I want to know what Sony and MS are doing in this area. I could care less about the PR.

Now on to some mathmatical conjecture. 32 chips for 16TFLOPs. That is 500GFLOPs per chip. Note that the CELL engineer says "This figure is "probably a p.r. exaggeration," the Cell engineer says" but "future workstations containing racks of 32 chips" will likely reach 16TFLOPs". So it would seem 500GFLOPs CELLS are the future but not the present.

The article also states that the current chip is in the 250GFLOPs range which with the "future" comment and putting the numbers together seems to confirm the first CELLS will be in the 250GFLOPs range.

So my guess is that the first CELLs are going to be 250GLFOPs and that a shrink to 45nm will bring about 500GFLOPs chips that will make up the 32chip 16TFLOPs workstations.
 
Inane_Dork said:
Great. We get to hear Emotion Engine hype all over again.
Second verse, same as the first.

:rolleyes: Hype comments are the white space of console discussions.

(Though I do expect Cell to be much more important to computing than the EE ever was.)

EE and Cell are one and the same only separated by time.
 
EE had lousy performance considering the area it took, the VUs were too limited in both performance and flexibility to justify the size IMO. A spruced up SH-4 would have offered the same performance with easier programming and a smaller die size. Now I still dont like the Cell architecture that much, but it is at least moderately flexible and if they can pump out 250 GFLOPs without exceeding the EEs initial die size it will be a far better design.
 
london-boy said:
You know, even if PS3 is a dud, even if no one will buy it, at least Sony will have DBZ fans buying it just for the names....

Super Cell ||| Frieza Bu Edition pack will sell like hotcakes...
...and that's probably 80 million right there. :p
 
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