Sony Cell hysteria...
Seems the world is still going mad about Sony/IBM's Cell Chip. Articles from people espousing the virtues of an as yet unreleased chip are always amusing. I think its on the rocks already. Biggest clue: nVidia are back in the picture to "help with the graphics". Why does the awesome cell require nVidia to do graphics? Because general purpose CPUs are never as good at shading billions of pixels in real time as a custom piece of silicon.
In fact the reason is evident in the specs. 8 floating point units running at a mythical number of GHz. Assuming they can actually do 8 64 operations a cycle. Nvidia's last GPU had 16 pipes, with effectively 128 bits of precision across the board. It's clock is tied quite closely to the amount of data that the memory can provide - the limiting factor. It also is designed to deal precisely with pixel data and formats. I'd lay money that it would beat the Cell head to head on any real world pixelshader test.
As a processor killer, cache control is its biggest weakness. Sounds to me like its going to be waiting for a lot of stuff to happen, as memory is locked and unlocked. Actually getting all 8 running simulateously will take a programming feat. Still I am sure lots of demo writers out there can make it do some pretty nifty stuff...
In fact the reason is evident in the specs. 8 floating point units running at a mythical number of GHz. Assuming they can actually do 8 64 operations a cycle. Nvidia's last GPU had 16 pipes, with effectively 128 bits of precision across the board. It's clock is tied quite closely to the amount of data that the memory can provide - the limiting factor. It also is designed to deal precisely with pixel data and formats. I'd lay money that it would beat the Cell head to head on any real world pixelshader test.
As a processor killer, cache control is its biggest weakness. Sounds to me like its going to be waiting for a lot of stuff to happen, as memory is locked and unlocked. Actually getting all 8 running simulateously will take a programming feat. Still I am sure lots of demo writers out there can make it do some pretty nifty stuff...
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