IBM Plans to Open the Cell Processor 430
morcheeba writes "According to an EETimes article, IBM is planning on releasing the full specifications and software libraries for the powerful processor that will be in the Playstation 3. The goal is to stimulate open-source development for other applications of the chip. The article doesn't mention if there will be some affordable development systems for all these programmers -- I'm hoping for a ps3 devkit." From the article: "IBM is eager to find other opportunities for Cell, but it's going to take a lot of software work...Going to the open-source community makes sense, because they could attract a lot of pretty smart programmers who could spin out software and applications for Cell."
What I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
May I be the first to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Holy crap! That's amazing. Now, is this "fully open" a la' "Shared Source" or "fully open" as in "you have the same docs we do?" And what's with the comment about hardware discounts?
-theGreater.Re:What I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
All I can say is... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:What I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because the chips specs will be out, doesn't mean the whole PS3 will be open. So that won't happen.
Re:What I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't sound like they're particularly upset about it.
Re:What I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
This will blow 3rd party development wide open for the next gen Playstation.
Look at Sony's history - they normally don't like that so much.
Just another indication ... (Score:1, Insightful)
IBM "gets" Open Source
The next "IBM Compatible" standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What I wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
For example, the PS1 uses a MIPS R3000. You can find the specs for this processor in a lot of places (just google "mips r3000" if interested).
Knowing that, you know about NOTHING of the Playstation, as there are a lot of additional hardware.
A game console has more CPU dedicated to a special task than a PC.
Re:the real question (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, it would benefit Sony too.
Really there isn't too much of a story here. It is only a story because Sony is involved. If Sony wasn't using the Cell in the PS3 and the Cell was just some new chip from IBM, they would be doing the exact same thing anyways. We tend to think of the Cell as the "PS3 chip", but really the PS3 is just the first product to market to use it.
A free anti XBOX 360 Army (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps by giving every anti-Microsoft fanatic video game freak an outlet? When licensed 3rd party support becomes even on both sides of the map, it will be consumer mods that make the difference to gamers. Can I mod chip it to play foreign games? Can I put vinyl kits on it? Can I use it to power my toaster?
Theoretically, one might be able to write some code that will allow you to play foreign games without having to void your warranty. How huge is that?
Also, Sony is going to need something extra to get people to buy it's system after a XBOX 360 Holiday season, and this may just be that.
Wonderful (Score:2, Insightful)
1) When will the chip be available?
2) How much power will it disipate?
3) How much will it cost?
Then maybe I can design a product around it. Until then, it's vaporware for all practical intents and purposes.
Re:What I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, they might not like it, but they sure as hell have to see the benefit to it over a totally closed system. Well I HOPE they see the benefit. As you say, this IS Sony we're talking about.
The Cell's Future? (Score:3, Insightful)
As well, I think that moving to Cell would be a very positive step for the computer industry as a whole, helping it to get out of a rut that it seems to have fallen into. The benefits are enormous, the least of which is that if Cell starts becoming standard, average computing power of a desktop will skyrocket, allowing for brand new, highly computing intensive applications to be developed.
Re:All 3 consoles = IBM? (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been hearing this argument a lot lately but I just can't quite understand it. So the consoles will all be using a variation of the Power processor. How does that translate into more games for the Mac? Linux has been running on x86 hardware forever yet no one has every tried to say, "Windows games run on x86 hardware so they should be easy to port to Linux or at the very least have some market value in porting the games to that platform." There's a lot more to it than just what the underlying instruction set happens to be...
The more chips sold... (Score:2, Insightful)
Script Flip Chip (Score:5, Insightful)
This time, IBM is the necessary part in the Playstation, which is in the hands of this generation's maverick niche market: gamers. Their Cell processors give them Microsoft's opportunity: base the market in the demanding niche, and market their product outside of it, leveraging their market feedback and brand into the larger market, including supplying competitors to the original platform. IBM is flipping the script: selling hardware means opening the software promotes their sales, inverting Microsoft's formula of taking software proprietary to capture more of the market defined by the hardware.
It all looks great on paper. Especially the greater scalability and persistence of open software, compared to Microsoft's centralized, proprietary approach. Time will tell if IBM can manage the opportunity, competing against Microsoft, as well as Microsoft did in the 1980s - and better than Microsoft will in the 2000s.
Re:Calling all pawns... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sony can't do much about this now, anyway, it's way too late in the game to switch processors, and IBM probably has enough patents on the thing to prevent anyone from making an equivalent too soon.
Somehow I don't think this is going to hurt Sony though. True blue Geek Buzz generates the right kind of attention to a new product. If people think that cool hacks will be coming out for the PS3, then they'll be more likely to hold off and not buy an XBox 360 (this is certainly changing MY opinion, and while my main reason for buying a PS3 might be to hack around, I'll still get some games -- it's been a while since I've played anything up to date, and I'm certainly never going to drop the crazy money it takes to get a PC up to respectable gaming speed)
Sony is generally a lot more hacker friendly that major competitors Apple and Microsoft. I think they'll be smart enough to see that this a) only affects a very small market segment and b) will generate good press.
Re:Functional Compilers, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your idea seems to be that idealism would drive the CS curriculum, which then would drive the industry. My observation over the last 10 years has been the opposite. In 1996, CS freshman were learning Scheme and Haskell; today they are using Java, because "it's more practical and aligned with the industry" or some such excuse. But now that the bust has eliminated all the "I just want to get rich" CS students, maybe it will swing the other way.
Most CPUs are "open" (Score:3, Insightful)
PowerPC, x86, MIPS, you name it) and you can download detailed specs, both for
the programming model and the hardware details. Honestly, I can't think of a
CPU that this hasn't been true for. Maybe with the general closedness
of GPUs people are forgetting this.
Re:It has still yet to be explained to me (Score:3, Insightful)
What's more likely is for them to be cooperatively scheduled. SPE code could signal when it's done a block.
Actually, now that I think about it, there's a central memory manager module, which handles transfering data to and from SPEs. Potentially the Cell could build a dependency map of how the buffer blocks feed through the SPEs, and detect when more data is coming from system RAM, and start the context switch then.
RAM -> SPE0 -> SPE5 -> SPE2 -> RAM
The main CPU would build metrics to see how long each SPE takes to process a block of data, so when it's near time to context switch, it could wait for the next copy of data from RAM to SPE0, at which point it would stop not let the copy happen. When all of the old data was done copying from SPE0 to SPE5, then SPE0 could be context switched away. Similarly when SPE5 was done processing its data, and had copied it to SPE2, then it would be context switched, and so on.
Instead of thinking of all of the SPEs as part of one process, that would be preemptively scheduled together, think of them as separate threads that would be independantly scheduled, but whose dependancies would provide hints as to the best time to context switch them each.
Re:Good to see... (Score:4, Insightful)
Those fancy vector units are also not tuned for general purpose computing. The 250+ GFLOP numbers that have been widely quoted are for single percision mathematics with non-standard rounding. There is a stricter double percision mode available, but it's a full order of magnitude slower.
Another in a line of stragetic moves? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't help but wonder if this is directly related to IBM's decision to sell their PC business to Lenovo. IBM has watched counless Linux geeks mod the XBox and install their OS of choice. If it were to take off like wildfire, this kind of modding would be potentially dangerous to the traditional OEM PC market, because it would mean that cheap (like $199) machines that can be made to run a powerful OS and do things like MythTV and the like could subvert the normal PC market. Sure, the market for modded Xboxen is small, and confined to hobbyists, but if the architecture were open and you didn't have to mod it, a lot more people would do it.
Of course if you aren't an OEM, this looks much less terrifying. In fact, it starts looking more and more like an opportunity. So a company like IBM can sell its money-losing OEM business and get into the game system market with no worries about what happens to x86 if the new consoles start to hurt the PC.
Maybe they weren't thinking "Let's get rid of this money-losing PC business." Maybe they were thinking "Let's kill x86 by building a cheaper PC market on another architecture, staring with a console, but expanding into other appliances. We'll open it up so that people get interested, Linux will be running on it in no time, new Linksys and Netgear routers will use it, and then on to other appliances we haven't even imagined yet. It'll find its way into PCs, and PCs will suddenly be as cheap as a console. Come to think of it, before we do any of this, let's schedule a meeting with Lenovo ... suckers."
Re:Functional Compilers, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I'm not totally convinced Haskell will take off even if FP does become hugely mainstream. As a language it has pretty atrocious usability. More likely, mainstream imperative languages will incorporate extensions that allow for function programming: after all, parametric polymorphism and lambda functions (sort of) already entered mainstream imperative languages.
Alternatively, something like Subtext [subtextual.org] may prove to be the way forward. All I know is I'm convinced there is a better way to do lazy function programming than Haskell ;)
Oh, and for what it's worth, while learning Haskell and Floyd-Hoare logic is mind expanding, graduates that can write code which compiles are probably more desirable long term. The free market doesn't demand languages like Java because it's McCrap, they demand it because it makes the most sense for many commercial projects (aka getting things done outside of academia).
Re:What I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Functional Compilers, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Functional Compilers, anyone? (Score:1, Insightful)