Cell processor in a laptop at CES…
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/video/0,139101587,49295004,00.htm
Matt
It is EXTREMELY difficult to see how the fine grained control of
transactional memory that is available with the full cell will be
available with this “spe’s hung on a Core 2”. The first article even
got it wrong, calling this a core 2 quad (from the remarks that followed
right after calling it core 2 duo).
Of course, this will not burn a hundred watts to run the six spe’s (not
8 like the first article says) in the PS3 but I suspect that the
penalties for having this subset are larger than are immediately
apparent. Having an EIB is nice but having no IO path (such as would
exist on a laptop) to get really high speed data into them seems likely
to not be there. Almost certainly it will not have a capable
northbridge to accomplish the high speed IO.
Bob
On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 09:33:48AM -0800, Matt E. wrote:
Cell processor in a laptop at CES…
The article doesn’t quite get it right (no surprise there)…
The SpursEngine is a media coprocessor that has 4 SPEs in it and
dedicated h/w for MPEG-2 and H.264.
No PPC, not a “Cell Broadband Engine”
This article seems a bit more grounded:
Eric
Eric B. schrieb:
The SpursEngine is a media coprocessor that has 4 SPEs in it and
dedicated h/w for MPEG-2 and H.264.No PPC, not a “Cell Broadband Engine”
This article seems a bit more grounded:
Eric
I read some of the article and had a moment of humor…
Image recognition-related algorithm engineers naturally insisted that
processing capacity
is never too much, but we finally decided the number of SPEs in
consideration of the
balance between processing capacity and the size of a circuit area that
an LSI for digital
electronics can afford.
I was heartened to see that in the area of image recognition things
haven’t changed in 20
years… we were telling managers that these were hard problems, and
dispite that, they
would sell pie-in-the-sky capablity, and of course, without any
attendent development
budget… because all it was some software…
John C…