On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Noah yan wrote:
it is well known that Cell and XBox CPU are all powerpc ISA. Cell is
gaining popularity in not only the gaming computing, but in others,
such as the coming road-runner, a hybrid opteron-cell supercomputer;
terra soft is building the first cell-based supercomputer, IBM is
selling cell blade and workstation and mercury already has cell board
about one year ago. also tons of documents available from IBM web,
including both SDK and full-system cell simulator.
We've had a "check this out" thread on Cell, I actually think it was on
opensolaris-discuss, about at the time when IBM released the first specs
for Cell. More than a year ago ...
But then, all the hype about Cell forgets one important thing: From the
point of view of the operating system kernel, it's just a single-core PPC.
The distinguishing feature of Cell, the vector unit, doesn't help an OS
core at all (though you could speculate using it for such mundane tasks as
block copy/clear or maybe even something elaborate as data compression and
encryption).
Within "Sun Marketing terms", you might call the Cell and the Niagara both
chips for "throughput computing", but while Niagara focuses on integer
parallelism Cell goes for FPU parallelism/vectorization. Complementary
approaches, and a hybrid Niagara/Cell sounds technically fascinating; but
as far as OS porting and running generic applications on it goes, the Cell
is "just a plain old PPC CPU". Its vector capabilities would benefit
generic applications / OS kernels only in very few areas.
it is suprising that here are left far behind what happens outside of
solaris. it is not good sign. OS research is mostly driven by hardware
architecture, Cell seems represents the trends of future
microprocessor (CPU+GPU on a chip) architecutre, also see what AMD is
doing in fusion and Torrenza.
All the "use graphics cards as vector daughter boards" (see Nvidia's
latest announcements for the nv8800 as well) methods are very interesting
for HPC, and in that aspect highly-parallel vector units (such as Cell,
such as any multi-pipeline floating-point vector shader graphics card)
create a revival of the "floating point coprocessor". It's the HPC hype of
the day. I'll believe it once such a box enters the top500.
None of that reduces the "coolness" factor, though. Yes, I'd like a PS3
running Solaris, it'd be really cool - not its temperature, though :)
FrankH.
before a powerpc solaris port is available, it does not make sense
doing cell port at all, which will start powerpc port anyway.
Noah
On 11/15/06, Dennis Clarke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ken mays wrote:
>> OpenSolaris for Sony Playstation 3
>>
>> This makes for an interesting OpenSolaris project for several reasons:
>>
>> 1. Stable hardware platform
>> 2. Simplied device driver support
>> 3. Modern features (Blu-Ray, Cell processor, Nvidia GPU, HDMI/HDTV,
>> Bluetooth, 20GB HD, Networking)
>> 4. Global distribution
>> 5. Very Large developer community
>> 6. Large financial backing
>>
>> An OpenSolaris project built around Sony Playstation 3 allows use of the
>> advanced sound and powerful graphics capabilties - and well as a
portable
>> multi-purpose platform.
>>
>> Something to think about,
>
> Is this actually a proposal to port to the PS3 hardware ?
> Are you intending to lead that project ?
I think it may just be enthusiasm run rampant. Which is perfectly cool.
The cell processor has not even seen the light of day yet and I doubt that
there is a pile of documentation available on it in any case. Yes it looks
very fast and it is a very good thing that someone wakes up in the morning
and looks at it and says "we have to get OpenSolaris ported to that
puppy!".
Great enthusiasm.
Just think what the other extreme could be eh ?
--
Dennis Clarke
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