PS3 Cell specs

[Gryph]

Yeah, I don't know why G4 decided to drop the TechTV name and shows and play more crappy gaming shows for the "cool" gamers. I crap all over G4.

[Bluestinger X]

Man, you DC fans never give it a rest.  Sorry, but I owned a DC and thought it was over hyped by the hardcore fans.  Sega has a knack for making highly rated games that, in reality, most people don't want to play.  Soon as it died all the die hards came out of the woodwork and have practically raised it to sainthood.  Spare me. 

 

Sega killed themselves.  Period.  It all started back with failures like the SegaCD and 32X.  Then came the Saturn (another since over idealized system) with very poor advertising and a ludicrous $400 USD price tag.  Yeah, I owned it too.  Then along comes the PSX.  It revived gaming.  You anti-Sony types may claim it's a bad thing that gaming became more mainstream, but it is what funds the increasingly expensive to make games these days.  Deal with it. 

 

The PSX was a great system and it earned its millions of fans.  Meanwhile Sega had shot itself in the foot too many times by the time the DC launched and most people didn't give a damn.  Sure, it had a great launch day... all the die-hard Sega fans showed up early, but after that it was downhill because the most gamers were willing to wait for Sony's next system.  Again, Sony had earned those fans with a great performance with the PSX.  So go ahead and cry all you want about how the Sony hype machine killed the DC, but keep in mind that Sega themselves are as much to blame for what happened and Sony had earned the hype.

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sony fan boys are like adult nintendo fanboys... they diss anything thats not sony. I saw this group of ps2 fans once at game store , theses guys had to be in there 20s. One of them said he was thinking of getting an xbox for xbox live. The rest were like hell no xbox is cheap i hear they break then less then a week and then they went on about how GREAT PS2 is. I almost wanted to ask what the flock they been smokin since thats the ps2s problem...

...what? Dude, in case you don't know, competition fosters creativity and better products.

 

very true... competition is good for the gamer... keeps things new and creative coming out to spite the enemy. meaning more for us... what EA is doing is every gamers worst nightmere... we will probably be seeing the same old crap from them for the next 15 years.

[Wizard]

Sony sucks. They suck at everything that isn't a TV.

[Gryph]

Here's some more stuff (thanks to Magnis for telling me about it):

When Sony reveals the technical details of the highly-anticipated advanced microprocessor code-named Cell, they will announce that the new processor will run at 4.6 gigahertz. IBM, Sony and Toshiba will present four technical papers next month at the International Solid State Circuits Conference to be held in San Francisco.

 

The Cell is a multicore chip comprising a 64-bit Power processor core and multiple synergistic processor cores capable of massive floating point processing. Cell is optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications, including computer entertainment, movies and other forms of digital content.

 

Sony plans to use the Cell to power its next generation PlayStation as well as home servers for broadband content and high-definition televisions.

 

 

Other highlights of the Cell processor design include:

 

    * Multi-thread, multicore architecture.

    * Supports multiple operating systems at the same time.

    * Substantial bus bandwidth to/from main memory, as well as companion chips.

    * Flexible on-chip I/O (input/output) interface.

    * Real-time resource management system for real-time applications.

    * On-chip hardware in support of security system for intellectual property protection.

    * Implemented in 90 nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology.

 

 

 

http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/7511/Cell-Pr...-Run-at-46-Ghz/

Edited January 25, 2005 by GryphonKlaw

[Bluestinger X]

Sony sucks. They suck at everything that isn't a TV.

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no thats not true even there tvs suck.. way to over priced.

[Wizard]

Their TVs after 2000 are pretty good, their good if you get them on sale especially.

 

Gryph: That thing is gonna get hyped with big numbers and you know it. Xbox delivered, Nintendo also(real world vs stupid renders), now let's see if Sony can actually get up to their hype.

Edited January 25, 2005 by K`dash

[Gryph]

Yeah, everytime I read anything by them the words EMOTION ENGINE come slap me in the face.

[Agozer]

Yeah, everytime I read anything by them the words EMOTION ENGINE come slap me in the face.

ROFL. Really? I wonder...

[Daeval]

sony fan boys are like adult nintendo fanboys... they diss anything thats not sony. I saw this group of ps2 fans once at game store , theses guys had to be in there 20s. One of them said he was thinking of getting an xbox for xbox live. The rest were like hell no xbox is cheap i hear they break then less then a week and then they went on about how GREAT PS2 is. I almost wanted to ask what the flock they been smokin since thats the ps2s problem... 

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Having worked video game retail for over a year, I can safely say that problem is now basically gone from both systems. New PS2s haven't regularly had that or the "blue disc" issue for a while. And the XBox went through basically the same issue in late 2003/early 2004. So basically, it WAS valid to say that of either system, but not really at all anymore. Now it's basically fanboy fodder for either side. Stupid fanboys.

[Prican25]

From IGN.com

PS3 Power: Details on Cell

Sony, IBM and Toshiba unveil hard specs behind the upcoming PS3 processor.

By Chris Roper

February 7, 2005 - Sony Computer Entertainment, IBM and Toshiba held a press conference in downtown San Francisco this morning to unveil more details on their collaborative Cell processor. While there are still a few details and bits of information that the three companies are keeping mum about for the moment, they did reveal and confirm plenty of specs that had been only rumors and guesses for some time now.

 

 

 

For those of you who like reading numbers more than words, here are some raw specs (which we'll discuss below):

 

 

Each Cell processor contains 8 Synergistic Processing Units and a single 64-bit Power Architecture Unit (All are RISC designs with SIMD)

 

Operates at >4GHz and capable of >256GFLOPS

 

256KB Local Storage per SPU and 512KB L2 Cache (2.5MB total)

 

128+ concurrent transactions to memory per processor

 

High-speed internal element interconnect performing at 96B/cycle

 

234 million transistors

 

Prototype die size of 221mm^2

 

Fabricated with 90nm SOI process technology

 

Backtracking for just a second to cover those who haven't been following recent events (for example, we've put a man on the moon), the Cell microprocessor is a multi-core processor that's designed to handle a large number of tasks simultaneously. The first known major use of the Cell processor will be Sony's next-generation gaming machine, which we'll refer to as PlayStation 3 for the time being (Sony has yet to announce its official name, but you can bet on PS3).

 

While there wasn't any mention of PlayStation 3 at the press conference per-se, you can assume that the following specs will be very close to what will be going into the system. While Cell is being called a "supercomputer on a chip", NVIDIA will actually be providing the GPU in Sony's next system, which you can read more about here. Knowing that, if Cell is anywhere near as fast as what the rumors and these specs say, we'll have our hands on an extremely fast console by the end of 2006 (if the rumored release time stands true).

For the record, a wafer was actually shown at the press conference, proving that processors are actually coming off the line. It's good to know this thing actually exists.

 

A "specific" Cell processor was discussed at the conference. By "specific" we mean a certain design, though not necessarily clock speed. Cell is designed to be a scalable processor, meaning that more or fewer cores could be built into a single Cell processor. The following specs are based on the processor design that was discussed at the conference. Workstations, servers or other applications built with more cores could theoretically be many times faster.

 

The Cell processor that was discussed at the press conference is made up of 9 separate cores. There is a single 64-bit Power Processing Element (or Power Architecture Core) and 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The Power Processor Element (PPE) can best be thought of as a variation of a Power PC processor, though its an entirely new design, intending on "overseeing" the work of the whole Cell processor. The PPE sends off various instructions to the 8 SPEs which can then work autonomously.

 

Sony, IBM and Toshiba said that they have ran Cell processors at "greater than 4GHz", though they wouldn't name an exact speed. Performance of the processor is said to be in excess of 256GFLOPS (256 billion floating-point operations per second). That's an extremely large number, the sort that you normally throw around when you're talking about arrays of multiple processors or even supercomputers. Measuring FLOPS can be done in a few different ways, but as a comparable number the highest you could get from a fast Pentium 4 these days is somewhere in the upper 20's.

 

Cell is claimed to have "10X performance for many applications", which is in line with these numbers. The Power Processor Element can handle two threads simultaneously while each SPE can handle one, making for a total of 10 simultaneous threads, in line with the 10X performance number they're claiming. Sony, IBM and Toshiba declined to specify exactly which applications they were talking when they mentioned 10X performance, though we'd assume it's pure number crunching or data compression or encryption, those sorts of things.

 

Obviously, real-world performance for any processor is entirely dependent on how well any given piece of software is written for it, especially so for multi-processor (and multi-core) machines. When asked about how one would go about programming for Cell or how difficult the task of managing the SPEs would be, an IBM rep stated that there would be multiple programming models, allowing for different approaches to programming for Cell. Each programmer could theoretically pick and choose which method they like to work with and program that way. It was also said that language compilers for Cell (for C, C++, etc.) would be released as open-source so that anyone could learn to tinker with its innards or possibly mold a compiler around a separate programming style for different needs.

 

With something as powerful as Cell appears to be, heat is obviously a concern. The three companies behind it say that it runs solely on air-cooling, just as any desktop processor does. Cell also has built-in power management for keeping itself running cool, capable of operating at five separate power states.

 

So, there you have it. Sounds impressive indeed, though we have yet to actually see Cell running in any sort of real-world scenario. If the performance numbers that Sony, IBM and Toshiba claim are realistic, and more importantly, Cell is reasonable to program for, then we'll be looking at some insanely powerful hardware in the not-too-distant future, including Sony's next-generation console.

 

check out the link to see the wafer of the cpu, damn tiny: http://ps2.ign.com/articles/585/585865p1.html

[NeoMaster]

Nice, I saw this awhile ago. Interesting part about it (only part i understand) is that it's greater than a 4ghz comp.