Re: a dozen cpu's on a chip

John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 17 May 2008 13:24:00 -0700, Archimedes' Lever
<OneBigLever@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sat, 17 May 2008 09:43:17 GMT, Jan Panteltje
<pNaonStpealmtje@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

See links above.

Those are more than 2 years old, dip***.

IBM has blades that are DUAL Cell powered. It is a product, and you can
bet that despite the article claiming that it is the "same" as what is in
the PS3, it is not. It has ALL of it SBEs functional and in use. That
is a tighter testing spec than the cell dice that are considered "good"
for a PS3.

Any idea of what the various processors would typically do on a blade?

John

I don't have any of those myself--my cluster is made of dual-Opteron pizza boxes, which I got for a song as refurbs (don't tell anyone). A friend two labs down has a BladeCenter with a bunch of Cell blades in it, though. (He mainly works on liquid metal cooling at the moment--the new Apples are shipping with his liquid metal cooling technology.)

The programming tools look a lot like vanilla Power Linux, but with this magical vector capability. They get used for rendering, ray tracing, some HPC jobs, stream processing, video encoding, and suchlike--with a SIMD architecture you need vectorizable work. The compilers are smart enough to vectorize a lot of apparently iterative work too, I believe, so it isn't just a Power 6 with a bag hung on it.

When I was a kid right out of school, building satcom equipment, I was being really surprised by how demanding telecom performance specs were--I had this idea it was like AM radio, I suppose. It's the same with games machines--the technology drivers of the 2000s.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs
.

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