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Cell Processors - G6?

A

alexmaccoll


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Do any of you guys know whether apple/ibm are working as hard as everyone else on these cell processors. They sound superb!
Let me know - I'm worried that everyone will bring them out and apple will be rendered obselete!
Alex
 
M

meltbanana314

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The Cell processors are derived from IBM's POWER line of processors. So are the PowerPC 970/FX processors... aka the G5 processors. Of course Apple will get a piece of the computing pie when the Cell processor comes out. They will never be "rendered obsolete."
 
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Amen-Moses


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alexmaccoll said:
Do any of you guys know whether apple/ibm are working as hard as everyone else on these cell processors. They sound superb!
Let me know - I'm worried that everyone will bring them out and apple will be rendered obselete!
Alex
Click to expand...

Who is "everyone else", as far as I know IBM and partners are the only ones "working hard" on cell processors.

Oh and the initial core processor for the cell will undoubtedly be the G5 so not only will it be extremely easy to port OS X to cell I would imagine it will be the first OS to be usable on cell technology.

I really, really hope that one of the first products that some bright spark makes will be a PCI-X card containing cell processors that can be plugged into a G5 PowerMac.

Amen-Moses
 
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Amen-Moses said:
Oh and the initial core processor for the cell will undoubtedly be the G5 so not only will it be extremely easy to port OS X to cell I would imagine it will be the first OS to be usable on cell technology.
Click to expand...

Where did you hear that?
 
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Graphite


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Guesses. Educated guesses.
 
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meltbanana314

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mynameis said:
Where did you hear that?
Click to expand...

As I said before, the Cell processor and G5 share similiar blood through the POWER architecture. Getting OS X to work on the Cell processor should be a piece of the proverbial cake.
 
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Amen-Moses


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mynameis said:
Where did you hear that?
Click to expand...

IBM. The first products using cell technology will be high end workstations from IBM by the end of this year, there are no plans to develop a new core that I am aware of and it appears that the PS-3 chip will also be based on the G5 core for the same reason.

Amen-Moses
 
OP
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Cheers guys, good to know!
 
K

Kokopelli

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Though the cell's core processing unit (PPE) is a PowerPC including the complete VMX instruction set it is important to note that the PPE is not based upon the G5. This is a common misconception though. The PPE is actually based on an IBM research project from the late 90s. The PPE probably has more in common with the Power5 architecture found in IBMs P-Series servers than the G5.

Further it remains to be seen what level of coding will be required to take advantage of the SIMD Processing Elements (SPE). It is possible that auto vectorization optimizations in GCC 4 (coming out in Tiger for Apple) will be able to make some use of the SPEs but in all likelihood to fully utilize them code will need to be ported to the architecture. Utilizing 8 SIMD processers with local access memory is very different from utilizing one or two conventional PowerPC processors.

OS X could be ported over to the cell architecture but it is not as simple as just recompiling the OS. Given Apple's working relationship wih both Sony and IBM it would not suprise me if Apple made use of the cell in some capacity, but it would surprise me if it materialized inside the next year or so.

Further reading for those interested:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT021005084318

And a slightly outdated but less confusing description:
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html
 
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inflexion


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tbh apple will have to wait untill IBM has made some money back on its cell processors first, what i was reading was that the G5 is based on ibms older Power4 chip and there on Power5 now so i think that apple and the rest of us have a long wait untill they filter down to mainstream desktop level
 
K

Kokopelli

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Funny I was thinking the opposite, that IBM would actively encourage Apple to make use of the processor. The problem is the current cell processor is not designed for general computing use, great for graphics processing poor for general computing. My thoughts were that it could work as a PCI-X add on board for heavy video/graphics processing. With core image and core video ported to make use of an add on board the increase in performance for applicable tasks could be potentially very impressive. It would be an expensive add on but still cheaper than creating a rendering farm.

For now I would wait a generation or two of the cell processor before I would expect to see it as the only processor in a Mac.
 

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