Cell: supercomputer on a chip?
Last week, at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), IBM, Sony & Toshiba got into details of their jointly developed microprocessor code-named Cell.
Look! eight cores!
Among the highlights of Cell released:
* Cell is a breakthrough architectural design—featuring eight synergistic processors and top clock speeds of greater than 4 GHz (as measured during initial hardware testing)
- Cell is a multicore chip capable of massive floating point processing
- Cell is OS neutral and supports multiple operating systems simultaneously
...and some numbers
- 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
Weeeeell, that sounds good, doesn’t it?
IBM and Sony have created high expectations in the platform by stressing that a one-rack server equipped with a Cell processor system will reach a performance of 16 TFlops – a rating that would put such a system into sixth place of the current Top 500 supercomputer ranking.
Look! eight cores!
Time to do play it down a little, don’t you think?
Over at Gizmodo, there’s a great sum-up… 7 Myths of the New Cell Processor :-)
Now let’s wait till we actually see a demo of the PS3 at the E3...
useful links:
Dissection of the Cell over at Arstechnica
...and part II
some more details
Playstation 3 at Wikipedia
BTW, did I mention it has eight cores?
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