Goodbye Intel and AMD?

[woodchip]

So might this be the demise of our favorite chip makers?:

"Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines, Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a â??supercomputer on a chipâ?

[Warlock]

seems like every year some one says that have a chip that kills AMD and Intell. i rember when they where braging about a chip called Crueso and well it jsut vanish in to thin air

[Krom]

It is impossible to replace x86 without becoming x86, which is why the PC will prevail.

[Iceman]

Krom you are so right. The installed base of x86 software would, simply put, cost hundreds of billions of dollars to replace. The corporate world just cannot replace it without a good 20 to 30 years of concerted effort ...

Now ... XBox and GameCube [edit] and Nintendo[/edit] lookout!

Oh ... and in advance ... STFU Mobius

[STRESSTEST]

Oh ... and in advance ... STFU Mobius

haha

[CDN_Merlin]

It would take at least 10 years before this could become mainstream. They would have to 1) Make sure it's backward compatible, 2)Price it in the range of Intel or AMD chips, 3) Bug free.

#3 is the most important because if they are trying to shoot down AMD or Intel they better have done their homework and provide a rock solid CPU.

[woodchip]

seems like every year some one says that have a chip that kills AMD and Intell. i rember when they where braging about a chip called Crueso and well it jsut vanish in to thin air

Looks like it is more than wishful thinking:

:Its unveiling at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco has been eagerly awaited and products containing Cell including Sony's PlayStation 3 games console are expected as early as next year."

The conference is today BTW.

[Grendel]

Cell's major target are game consoles aka "multimedia centers". What makes it different from "traditional" chips is just that -- "chip" vs "chips". So yes, it's amazing for one chip but won't replace any sophisticated multi chip machine.

[Mobius]

I'll take that as my cue then.

It's ENTIRELY possible the new core designs will be more than capable of emulating an X86 processor and *still* be faster than the latest batch of native X86 cores. But yes, it'd take years to usurp the existing user base.

[Krom]

And by then, x86 will be a couple generations newer and a couple generations faster, cell will fall to the sidelines of AMD and Intel's titanic R & D budgets.

[fliptw]

the cell is all about parallel processing, they are designed to be easily grouped together to solve problems, I wouldn't be surprised that emulation of x86-32 would be effortless with this technology.

x86-32 is very old, very innefficiant design. more general purpose registers is more useful than larger MHZ, and ideally, x86 would die sooner than later.

[STRESSTEST]

sorta like terrorists

[Aggressor Prime]

Tom says that the Cell will have 8 cores, each clocked at 4GHz. All that on a 90 nm SOI with only a 221 mm2 footprint and 234 million transistors.

[woodchip]

Tom says that the Cell will have 8 cores, each clocked at 4GHz. All that on a 90 nm SOI with only a 221 mm2 footprint and 234 million transistors.

Interesting. Using the quote there is one more sentence than can be seen in the topic.
Tom says the whole thing will run at 4g, not each core.

[Iceman]

I haven't owned a console since PS1 but I think I might acquire a PS3 when they come out just for funsies ... This could be a really cool platform.

[Aggressor Prime]

Tom says that the Cell will have 8 cores, each clocked at 4GHz. All that on a 90 nm SOI with only a 221 mm2 footprint and 234 million transistors.

Interesting. Using the quote there is one more sentence than can be seen in the topic.
Tom says the whole thing will run at 4g, not each core.

That is not how multi-cores work. You don't add up the GHz because each program can only use 1 core (if it is a single threaded program like most games). Ex: AMD said that they will launch a dual-core Opteron @ 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz. Do you think that each core only runs at 1.1GHz and 1.2GHz? Another Ex: Intel said that they will launch a dual-core Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, and 3.2GHz. Do you think each core only runs at 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz, and 1.6GHz? Remember, these things are hotter than the 3.8GHz chip (130W instead of 115W). When people give GHz to multi-core chips, they are giving the GHz per core. Otherwise would be false advertising.

[Avder]

The Cell Architechture might be optimized to be vastly more scaleable in a multi-core environment than standard win32/x86 apps.

[Aggressor Prime]

The Cell will only gain success if it:
1) Is able to be used by custom systems. (Motherboards that support the socket are sold to the public along with the CPU itself.)
2) Utilizes some form of SLI.
3) Can run games like Descent 3 or Doom 3.

[fliptw]

The Cell will only gain success if it:
1) Is able to be used by custom systems. (Motherboards that support the socket are sold to the public along with the CPU itself.)
2) Utilizes some form of SLI.
3) Can run games like Descent 3 or Doom 3.

Or it has this support in hardware:

mv "Aggressor Prime" /dev/null

[woodchip]

Tom says that the Cell will have 8 cores, each clocked at 4GHz. All that on a 90 nm SOI with only a 221 mm2 footprint and 234 million transistors.

Interesting. Using the quote there is one more sentence than can be seen in the topic.
Tom says the whole thing will run at 4g, not each core.

That is not how multi-cores work. You don't add up the GHz because each program can only use 1 core (if it is a single threaded program like most games). Ex: AMD said that they will launch a dual-core Opteron @ 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz. Do you think that each core only runs at 1.1GHz and 1.2GHz? Another Ex: Intel said that they will launch a dual-core Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, and 3.2GHz. Do you think each core only runs at 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz, and 1.6GHz? Remember, these things are hotter than the 3.8GHz chip (130W instead of 115W). When people give GHz to multi-core chips, they are giving the GHz per core. Otherwise would be false advertising.

I guess I am confused:

"The prototype shown at the conference is based on Power architecture, integrates nine cores and runs at "more than 4 GHz". "

Doesn't say anything about each core.

[Mr. Perfect]

It's amazing how many people are speculating that this chip will replace Intel and Microsoft. I don't see how it can while it's only powering a Playstation.

[roid]

Coremon go!
*throws pokeball into market ring*
^_^

it's not goodbye for Intel and AMD, a forced evolution perhaps. we should all have a 3rd party party to celebrate.

[Grendel]

I guess I am confused:

"The prototype shown at the conference is based on Power architecture, integrates nine cores and runs at "more than 4 GHz". "

Doesn't say anything about each core.

The clock ismost likely a central clock line from which each core picks up whatever it needs.

More structual detail is later on:

The basic structure of the chip is comprised out of one 64-bit PowerPC chip and eight "synergistic processing units" (SPEs), the firms said. The PowerPC processor will integrate 32 kByte L1 and 512 kByte L2 cache, while the SPEs will use 256 KByte cache.

[..]and integrates 234 million transistors. This compares to about 125 million transistors of the current Pentium 4 processor[..]

On another note: about 130mio transistors are cache alone, leaves about 100mio for the 9 cores -- Vs 29mio for a single P4 core. Typical marketing BS. I wouldn't sweat over Cell. It'll do nicely what it's build for but won't replace the x86 architecture.

[roid]

isn't a PowerPC processor a MAC chip?

[Aggressor Prime]

No, the G5/G4/ect. is the MAC chip.
The PowerPC is the IBM chip. They are found in servers that are bought from IBM's website.

[DCrazy]

No, the G5/G4/ect. is the MAC chip.
The PowerPC is the IBM chip. They are found in servers that are bought from IBM's website.

LOL Aggressor. Gx refers to a generation of the PowerPC chip. PWNED!

I propose that Aggressor gets the custom tag of "DBB Dumbass".

[Aggressor Prime]

I'm sorry.
Normally when I see PowerPC, I see just Power.

[Capm]

If these chips compete with AMD and Intel, don't think for a second that those two companies don't know about this and have stuff up their sleeve ready to compete with it.

Yea, this company is going to have 8 core processors, whoopty-doo. AMD and Intel have their dual cores almost to market - no mistake about it - they've got bigger stuff on the way right behind them.

[Warlock]

if they do make it 5$ it will just die off like the *shutter*Cyrix chip

[JMEaT]

You have to keep in mind that AMD and Intel are cost effective solutions. A supercomputer on a chip sounds rather expesive.

[Mr. Perfect]

Can't be to expensive if it's going into a $300 console.

[WarAdvocat]

Is there like a rule that warlock is MUST misspell a word in every post, be-it-ever-so-short?

[Krom]

Yep, it is written in the DBB policy, "If thou are dyslexic, thou must misspell at least one word per post".

[Aggressor Prime]

4 Cells are going into the PS3.
Cells are inexpensive to make, just difficult to prepare for.
I doubt that 2009 is soon for AMD or Intel.
If we follow how AMD normally does thing, the K9 (dual cores) is 2005, the K10 (quad cores) is 2007, and the K11 (8 cores) is 2009. No doubt Intel will follow. If they try to release their 8-way core architectural design now:
1. They will be less efficient than normal.
2. They will cost AMD/Intel more than they can afford.
3. They will leave AMD/Intel empty for the next round.

You can't just come up with a super chip overnight. There is a process, and IBM/Sony/Toshiba have been going through that process for some time now.

While AMD and Intel are rolling out their dual core chips that use 90W and 130W respectfully, the Cell will be released using only 30W. It will be faster, cheaper, and cooler. Hopefully it will be sold on Newegg with some compatible motherboards. I would like to build a system with a couple of those things. If 1 can do a SETI unit in 5 minutes, I need all of them I can get my hands on.

[Krom]

One obvious thing to me is they are targeting cell at x86 CPUs and saying how much faster they will be, while you don't even hear that Nvidia and ATI even exist at all in all these articles.

Cell looks like a hand designed graphics processor to me. AMD and Intel CPUs are pretty much designed by hand, which is why they can reach 2-4 GHz.

I think Cell's main enemy is not going to be the x86 CPU, it is going to be the next generation video core. Modern video cards are already many times faster then x86 CPUs. I need to look over the specs again but my impression is one "cell" is not too far off from one pipeline in a modern video card. Hand designed with very low latency so it can reach high clock speeds, but other then that not much difference. If ATI and Nvidia keep up the race and keep coming up with huge performance leaps every 6 to 12 month product cycle it is going to be one hell of a tough act to follow.

[Aggressor Prime]

Look at The PC Retaliates: Cell V's GPU.

"The PC does have a weapon with which to respond, the GPU (Graphics Processor Unit). On computational power GPUs will be the only real competitors to the Cell.

GPUs have always been massively more powerful than general purpose processors [PC + GPU][GPU] but since programmable shaders were introduced this power has become available to developers and although designed specifically for graphics some have been using it for other purposes. Future generations of shaders promise even more general purpose capabilities[DirectX Next].

GPUs operate in a similar manner to the Cell in that they contain a number of parallel vector processors called vertex or pixel shaders, these are designed to process a stream of vertices of 3D objects or pixels but many other compute heavy applications can be modified to run instead [EE-GPU].

With aggressive competition between ATI and Nvidia the GPUs are only going to get faster and now "SLI" technology is being used again to pair GPUs together to produce even more computational power.

GPUs will provide the only viable competition to the Cell but even then for a number of reasons I don't think they will be able to catch the Cell.

Cell is designed from the ground up to be more general purpose than GPUs, the APUs are not graphics specific so adapting non 3D algorithms will likely mean less work for developers.

Cell has the main general purpose PU sharing the same fast memory as the APUs. This is distinct from PCs where GPUs have their own high speed memory and can only access main system memory via the AGP bus. PCI Express should speed this up but even this will be limited due to the bus being shared with the CPU. Additionally vendors may not fully support the PCI Express specification, existing GPUs are very slow at moving data from GPU to main memory.

There is another reason I don't think Nvidia or ATI will be able to match the Cell's performance anytime soon. Last time around the PC rapidly caught up with and surpassed the PS2, I think it is one of Sony's aims this time to make that very difficult so, as such Cell has been designed in a highly aggressive manner."


Also, doesn't the Cell have 2 pipes per sub core? (8x2=16pipes/Cell)

[Diedel]

Cell isn't simply a multicore design of identical cores. It has a general management core (PowerPC) and several vector units that are coordinated by the management hardware. The vector cores are very fast because they rely on a big on-chip cache instead of a complicated branch prediction and speculative execution logic, which makes up a major part of current mainstream CPUs.

Read more here: part 1, part 2.