Courtesy of IGN (with special thanks to Waco Kid over at VGR):
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/585/585865p1.html?fromint=1
For those of you who like numbers, here are the basics:
Each Cell processor contains 8 Synergistic Processing Units and a single 64-bit Power Architecture Unit (All are RISC designs with SIMD)
Operates at >4GHz and capable of >256GFLOPS
256KB Local Storage per SPU and 512KB L2 Cache (2.5MB total)
128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor
High-speed internal element interconnect performing at 96B/cycle
234 million transistors
Prototype die size of 221mm^2
Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology
Read the actual article and it's explained in better English.
There's also a cool NY Times article on it and the next Xbox Console:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/te...ogin&oref=regi
Here's an excerpt:
"There is a new game in town, and it will revive an industry that has been kind of sleepy for the last few years," said Richard Doherty, a computer industry analyst and president of Envisioneering, a market research company in Seaford, N.Y.
The Cell's introduction also comes at a time when the computer industry has largely given up investing in fundamentally new processor designs and has instead chosen to use the additional space available on the newest generation of chips to place multiple processors and thus add performance.
The Cell chip, computer experts said, could have a theoretical peak performance of 256 billion mathematical operations per second. With that much processing power, the chip would have placed among the top 500 supercomputers on a list maintained by scientists at the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee as recently as June 2002.
"This is extremely impressive," said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report, an industry technical publication, "and it proves that architectural innovation isn't dead."
One significant risk for Sony and I.B.M. is that the Sony PlayStation 3 game machine is likely to be introduced later than the next generation of Xbox from Microsoft. The PlayStation 2 beat the Xbox to market and Microsoft was never able to catch up, meaning that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars on its bet on the video game market.
In its next version of the Xbox, Microsoft plans to shift from using Pentium chips from Intel to a PowerPC microprocessor from I.B.M. The chip will have two PowerPC processor cores, but it will not be as radically new as the I.B.M. Cell design that Sony plans to use, said one executive who is familiar with the Microsoft project.
That will make for a fascinating rivalry: Sony is betting that its computer horsepower advantage will be large enough to give it a quality advance over Microsoft, even if it arrives late.
"Our goal with the Cell is to be an order of magnitude faster," said Lisa Su, an I.B.M. executive in charge of technology development and licenses.
Many industry executives believe that because of its low cost, the Cell is a harbinger of a fundamentally new computing era that will push increasingly into consumer applications.
Sounds like M$ will no longer have the tech advantage this next generation.
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/585/585865p1.html?fromint=1
For those of you who like numbers, here are the basics:
Each Cell processor contains 8 Synergistic Processing Units and a single 64-bit Power Architecture Unit (All are RISC designs with SIMD)
Operates at >4GHz and capable of >256GFLOPS
256KB Local Storage per SPU and 512KB L2 Cache (2.5MB total)
128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor
High-speed internal element interconnect performing at 96B/cycle
234 million transistors
Prototype die size of 221mm^2
Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology
Read the actual article and it's explained in better English.
There's also a cool NY Times article on it and the next Xbox Console:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/07/te...ogin&oref=regi
Here's an excerpt:
"There is a new game in town, and it will revive an industry that has been kind of sleepy for the last few years," said Richard Doherty, a computer industry analyst and president of Envisioneering, a market research company in Seaford, N.Y.
The Cell's introduction also comes at a time when the computer industry has largely given up investing in fundamentally new processor designs and has instead chosen to use the additional space available on the newest generation of chips to place multiple processors and thus add performance.
The Cell chip, computer experts said, could have a theoretical peak performance of 256 billion mathematical operations per second. With that much processing power, the chip would have placed among the top 500 supercomputers on a list maintained by scientists at the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee as recently as June 2002.
"This is extremely impressive," said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report, an industry technical publication, "and it proves that architectural innovation isn't dead."
One significant risk for Sony and I.B.M. is that the Sony PlayStation 3 game machine is likely to be introduced later than the next generation of Xbox from Microsoft. The PlayStation 2 beat the Xbox to market and Microsoft was never able to catch up, meaning that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars on its bet on the video game market.
In its next version of the Xbox, Microsoft plans to shift from using Pentium chips from Intel to a PowerPC microprocessor from I.B.M. The chip will have two PowerPC processor cores, but it will not be as radically new as the I.B.M. Cell design that Sony plans to use, said one executive who is familiar with the Microsoft project.
That will make for a fascinating rivalry: Sony is betting that its computer horsepower advantage will be large enough to give it a quality advance over Microsoft, even if it arrives late.
"Our goal with the Cell is to be an order of magnitude faster," said Lisa Su, an I.B.M. executive in charge of technology development and licenses.
Many industry executives believe that because of its low cost, the Cell is a harbinger of a fundamentally new computing era that will push increasingly into consumer applications.
Sounds like M$ will no longer have the tech advantage this next generation.
Only time will tell....
