• vox
  • Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
    vox
    Posts: 524 from 2003/11/24
    From: Belgrade
    Quote:

    Andreas_Wolf wrote:
    > I see it as grat multi purpose thing

    As it was explained numerous times in this thread alone, the Cell is not exactly what most would call a multi-purpose CPU. Sure, it can do everything in some way or another, but for many desktop computing purposes it just doesn't cut it.


    I do believe its closest to multi chipset Amiga thing out of all.
    And it is still used in IBM supercomputers, and even revised to DDR2.

    PowerXCell 8i
    In 2008, IBM announced a revised variant of the Cell called the PowerXCell 8i, which is available in QS22 Blade Servers from IBM. The PowerXCell is manufactured on a 65 nm process, and adds support for up to 32 GB of slotted DDR2 memory, as well as dramatically improving double-precision floating-point performance on the SPEs from a peak of about 12.8 GFLOPS to 102.4 GFLOPS total for eight SPEs, which, coincidently, is the same peak performance as the NEC SX-9 vector processor released around the same time. The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, the world's fastest during 2008-2009, consists of 12,240 PowerXCell 8i processors, along with 6,562 AMD Opteron processors.[24] The PowerXCell 8i powered super computers also dominated all of the top 6 "greenest" systems in the Green500 list, with highest MFLOPS/Watt ratio supercomputers in the world.[25] Beside the QS22 and supercomputers, the PowerXCell processor is also available as an accelerator on a PCI Express card and is used as the core processor in the QPACE project. Since the PowerXCell 8i removed the RAMBUS memory interface and added significantly larger DDR2 interfaces, and enhanced SPEs the chip layout had to be reworked which resulted in both larger chip die and packaging.

    Quote:

    > Maybe IBM still use or develop it

    If there's any truth in what IBM said in public, they don't.


    Well, we anyway use top noch avail CPUs. This seems to be enough for I.
    Dongarra and his team demonstrated a 3.2 GHz Cell with 8 SPEs delivering a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS on an average double precision Linpack 4096x4096 matrix.

    Quote:

    > unlike PWREfficient that was killed as baby.

    By Apple, not by IBM.


    I haven`t mentioned IBM here, point is Cell reached a lot of potential.
    And as far as I read PWR team was used to bring iPhone ARM CPUs.

    Quote:

    256 MiB VRAM isn't so much when to be used as system RAM. Even using all except 64 MiB VRAM as system RAM would give only 448 MiB. Besides, VRAM may be faster than system RAM, but only when accessed by the GPU. CPU access to VRAM is surely slower than to system RAM. .


    Even being a social scientist and not an IT guru, I we seen able hackers and programmers doing quite a lot of magic with even harder restrains.

    I am saying MOS Lite Cell, just basic stuff, but well optimized and having some VRAM or HDD Virtual mem.

    Quote:

    > YDL is reported to be poor just because its ported but not optimized.

    You can optimize a desktop OS only so much for Cell. Optimization in Cell-context would primarily refer to the SPEs, and it has already been explained that they are not really suited for desktop computing purposes. .


    If I got 21st and half century (Duck Dogers Stylee) desktop use is today multimedia oriented more then ever.

    Quote:

    > Soon will come BR Recorders and combo drives ...

    Blu-ray combo drives have been listed since at least 2007, external Blu-ray recorders since at least 2008 and internal ones since at least 2009:


    Surely, I am talking about prices for massess.

    In short: my idea is to have next cheap MOS PPC computer AND great console - SPS3.
    And SAM460ex /AresOne PPC as new board. That would give us outer reach even with younger generation. Its impossible, waste of time etc.

    If I had money, well I would design a new Cell based board and pay for Fedora 20, Mint 16XFCE, AmigaOS 4.2 and MorphOSm ports in reversed order :-)

    [ Edited by vox 17.01.2014 - 11:32 ]
    ------------------------------------------
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  • »17.01.14 - 10:30
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