The published hardware description of the Cell SPUs: 128 bit vector engines, 128 registers each, matches the published Freescale AltiVec processor architecture. I've looked over the programmer's documentation for that processor and believe that vector processing is of limited usefulness for the typical Cyc knowledge base instruction trace. As you know, vector computations are well suited for fine-grained parallelism in which a single operation is applied simultaneously to multiple operands. In Cyc, there are more opportunities for large-grained inference parallelism as opposed to fine-grained parallelism.
As the Cell programming model unfolds, it will be interesting to see just how much entertainment (game) AI programming will use the Cell SPUs as compared to using the Cell's conventional Power-derived GPU. I predict that no game AI algorithm will use the SPUs. This could be verified by examining the marketing claims of the game development code libraries that are sure to appear in the next couple of years. Generally, I find that the Cell architecture is further evidence that Moore's Law performance expectations will hold for several more lithography nodes (process technology generations). In particular, the use of chip area for multiple cores as opposed to simply more cache memory is a step in the right direction. A spreadsheet I maintain predicts that the x86 architecture will be 256 cores per chip at the 3.76 nanometer node, in the year 2022, which is nine lithography generations from now. My assumption is that the number of cores will double with each lithography generation, and that Intel will continue to migrate to a new generation every two years. It would suit Cyc-style AI processing best, if multi-core CPUs evolved in the direction of high performance MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) integer processing, as compared to the Cell SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) floating point processing. Cheers. -Steve On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > I presume everyone here is aware that the Cell architecture has been > officially announced. Technical details (as opposed to speculations gleaned > off patents) are yet scarce, but there's definitely some promise this > architecture becomes mainstream sometime within next two years. > > What are you going to do with it? > > -- =========================================================== Stephen L. Reed phone: 512.342.4036 Cycorp, Suite 100 fax: 512.342.4040 3721 Executive Center Drive email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Austin, TX 78731 web: http://www.cyc.com download OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org =========================================================== ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
