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IBM

Cell Broadband Engine Docs: VIP Access 17

Posted by Hemos from the locking-them-up dept.
I writes "The revolutionary Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) is the result of collaboration among Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. The following papers define the Cell specification and will be posted to the IBM Semiconductor Solutions Technical Library in September. You can access them early as long as you have a current IBM ID."
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Cell Broadband Engine Docs: VIP Access More

Cell Broadband Engine Docs: VIP Access

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  • dupe (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 29, 2005 @07:11AM (#13426058)
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/25/195025 0 [slashdot.org]
  • I like the idea of many simple CPUs on a die, but I want to extend that.
    Why not go for a quilt architecture?
    For example, what about using tiled hexagons and squares. The hexagons could be local memory, the squares could be the CPUs, the edges would be links to the next tile.
    The price of a single die would be set according to the number of flaws on the die.
    Smaller CPUs are less likely to be dead because of a single flaw, so you'd get a higher yield.
    You can fit more complete hexagons into a circular die
    • Actually they already do. The cell in fact has one more processor on it than they claim and there is some logic to choose the n-1 best chips at any one point so that the entire thing is fault tolerant both for manufacturing and, if you happen to get a die with all of the processors working, for use.
      • They do this because they don't have a choice; all of that silicon, errors are happening all over the place, and the best way to deal with the errors is to allow the 7 SPEs that work, to do so, and the lone SPE that probably didn't survive the manufacturing process is then cast as irrelevant.

        Personally, I've wondered if this is what has kept today's higher end chips out of my desktop. One has to realize how much it would affect pricing with error rates being higher than ever (smaller etching, and so many
        • It certainly is. But probably more on the graphic card side.
          Modern cards have something like 16 rendering pipelines, usually grouped in quartets. Cards that have all 16 working sell as the "XT PRO SUPER GT". Those who only get 3 of the quartets working sell as "LESS XT LESS PRO LESS SUPER LESS GT".
          They have the full functionality, but have less pipelines.
          Price obviously changes accordingly.

          Same for things like LCD screens. One of the reasons the PSP costs more than a DS, is because making a good big LCD scr

  • IBM ID (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Monday August 29, 2005 @07:37AM (#13426147) Homepage Journal
    Getting and IBM ID is only slightly harder than getting a /. ID - fill in a form, click submit.

    I registered last week at work to get the documentation, though I have not yet had a chance to even take a quick look at it.

    But for what I do (communications and signal processing) the Cell looks really good - I think I could replace several DSPs and protocol processors with one Cell.
    • Hey thanks. I thought it'd be harder to get one of those IDs.

      I've been wondering when I could get my hands on one; I'd like to see how it could do some artificial intelligence research that I've been working on. Here's for hoping!
      • IBM does some nice things. Even a developer ID, with all those nice packages, DVD's, alpha and betas is dead easy to get. I've had one for years now. And the documentation available for free is simply awesome. "Need INPUT!" ;-) Not like Microsoft at all where you have to pay for the privilege of documentation that is useful (and I have paid and paid and...).

  • Bug me not (Score:2, Informative)

    by Saiyine ( 689367 )

    Bug me not [bugmenot.com] to the rescue! Who knows, maybe there's someone interested in RTFA...

    --
    Dreamhost [dreamhost.com] superb hosting.
    Kunowalls!!! [kunowalls.host.sk] Random sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).

  • Wealth of information but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Monday August 29, 2005 @08:05AM (#13426254)
    I love IBM for all of the documentation they've provided at this point in time; one could actually start writing code to run on the SPUs right now, and probably only have to do a minimal amount of debugging once they get the hardware.

    But.. that being said, where's the hardware :(? I don't want to buy a PS3-dev kit (even if I could manage to get my hands on one); I just want to make my code fly on those seven SPUs. I wonder if there's an emulator currently available for the Cell processor, does anyone know?

  • Mutli Proc In General (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ezweave ( 584517 )

    It seems from TFA that this is really the place where the Cell proc would excell.

    But for more centralized processing, it seems like the world at large is not quite ready for this sort of multi-processing. I have only written assembly for single CPU multi threaded code, but locking problems are enough of a headache in that environ.

    A little O/T perhaps, but with the hope to use multicore procs as CPUs, does Vista/Longhorn seem even more... I don't know, maybe under-developed? From my limited experience, e

  • You can access all the same pdfs (but not the IBM forum) from Sony without registering.

    http://cell.scei.co.jp/index_e.html [scei.co.jp]

    Now that's VIP access.
    -SR

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