On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 10:18:11PM +0200, Sylvain Munaut wrote: > Hi, > > > Apologies if this subject has already been covered, but has anyone attempted > > to do table generations using PS3 hardware? > > I did a few back-of-the-enveloppe calculation and it ended up being in > the same order of magnitude as the ATI GPU cards ... but less > convenient (need to re-implement / re-test / re-rebug and not really > faster), so I didn't pursue. >
The performance on the Cell should be quite bad: 6 * 128bit ALU @ 3ghz versus 320 * 160bit ALU @ 750mhz (HD5870) together with the fact that the PS3 has way to little RAM for the index files. So you could use it for generation, but since that phase is now over, why bother. Once there was the plan to put some Cell blade clusters to work, but it was abandoned after some initial testing of an incomplete version of the generator. What we learnt was that it could be done, development on PS3+linux is quite comfortable. Last time i checked, the Cell architecture was a dead end and the current hardware is simply too old for HPC (if you do not happen to have your code running on an existing cluster, in that case the cost of migration may be uneconomical). As a sidenote the ration of SRAM to ALUs is also higher on the cell compared to GPU, be it nvidia or ati, consequently the MIPS per square millimeter is lower for problems which do not need excessive amounts of cache memory like A5/1 crypto. _______________________________________________ A51 mailing list A51@lists.reflextor.com http://lists.lists.reflextor.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/a51
