IBM's radical Cell processor could reshape entertainment
NV55
Holy Chip!
Daniel Lyons, 01.30.06
IBM's radical Cell processor, to debut in Sony's PlayStation 3, could
reshape entertainment and spark the next high-tech boom.
Later this year millions of homes will get a new supercomputer for the
living room. Or maybe the playroom. Sony's long-awaited PlayStation 3
game console, a slender yet muscular machine the size of a DVD player,
performs a mind-boggling 2 trillion calculations per second. This kind
of power, once reserved for seismic exploration and nuclear-weapons
design, will let programmers create videogames that look as realistic
as film.
Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could
end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next
microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a
microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM
(with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five
years. The Cell chip, based on a design inspired by supercomputers,
runs at least ten times as fast as Intel's most powerful Pentium. More
important, Cell boasts a staggering fiftyfold advantage in handling
graphics-intensive applications that will define the next generation of
visual entertainment--blindingly fast and seductively immersive games,
virtual-reality romps, wireless downloads, real-time video chat,
interactive TV shows with multiple endings and a panoply of new
services yet to be dreamed up.
IBM reckons Cell, potent and versatile, can do a lot more than just
play games. It sees a role for it in mobile phones, handheld video
players, high-definition televisions, car design and more. Scientists
at Stanford University are building a Cell-based supercomputer. Toshiba
plans to use the superchip in TV sets, which one day could let fans
watch a football game from multiple camera angles they control.
Raytheon is set to use Cell in missile systems, artillery shells and
radar. Other companies envision new high-definition medical imaging.
"Cell is the next step in the evolution of the microprocessor. It's a
peek into the future," says Craig Lund, chief technology officer at
Mercury Computer Systems, which makes medical and military systems and
is taking orders for Cell servers.
IBM is already at work on beefier versions of Cell, and it has launched
an allout campaign to woo a new generation of code-crunchers and game
boys to write software for its futuristic chip. In an extraordinary
move IBM disclosed hundreds of Cell's design secrets on the Internet,
releasing a developer's guide that 10,000 programmers have since
downloaded. IBM, with annual sales of $94 billion, says Cell could
power hundreds of new apps, create a new video-processing industry and
fuel a multibillion-dollar buildout of tech hardware over ten years.
"We think this is going to spawn the next generation of growth in the
industry," says James Kahle, 45, the renowned chip designer and IBM
Fellow who oversaw the creation of Cell. "This chip will give you
performance that is not achievable with any other architecture." Adds
H. Peter Hofstee, an IBM scientist and the chief architect of a key
part of the Cell chip: "We're talking about everything from making TVs
to shooting things up into space to building huge supercomputers." He
and Kahle spend much of their time on the road, running mind-blowing
demos and proselytizing prospective licensees and geek groupies.
But IBM will have to clear some high hurdles to deliver on Cell's
prodigious promise. Myriad competitors, including hotshot Silicon
Valley startups ClearSpeed and Stream Processors, are in pursuit of
next-gen chips. High tech is littered with the remains of chips that
boasted remarkable abilities in the lab but failed in the marketplace,
starved by reluctant programmers and recalcitrant customers and
strangled by their own makers' miscues. A quarter of a century ago Gene
Amdahl, the famed architect of the IBM 360 computer family, had an
ambitious scheme to pack supercomputer power onto a chip but was too
far ahead of his time, and his Trilogy Ltd. went down in flames. In the
early 1980s the chip in the Amiga home computer far outraced those in
the Intel line, but Intel conquered the market anyway. In the early
1990s Digital Equipment Corp. made the first 64-bit processor. It was
an engineering tour de force and a commercial flop.
If anything stops Cell's commercial success, it is likely to be the
chip's very power. It is, to put it politely, a challenging platform
for software creators. "The programming model is a nightmare," says
Marc Tremblay of Sun, chief architect of a rival chip called Niagara,
which uses a more traditional approach. He argues Cell's balky design
will snag widespread adoption beyond gaming.
Even the hard-sell salesmen at IBM are quick to say Cell poses no
threat to Intel, the world's leading chipmaker. Intel's processors do a
great job on the basic business applications for desktops, laptops and
servers. In this mature and mundane market Cell, specially geared to
spin out intricate images at very high speeds, offers no real
advantage. But the Intel architecture, 25 years old and constrained by
having to be compatible with predecessor chips, is ill suited to
next-gen imaging. Thus the world must move up to Cell, IBM argues. "We
are going into a new era," Kahle declares. "The world is changing."
An IBM demo shows the contrast. A terrain rendering program lets you
fly over Mount Rainier at 1,300mph. Cell crunches through millions of
lines of topographical and photographic data per second to paint
topographically accurate, photo-quality pictures at a movie-quality 30
frames per second. On a similar program a Pentium takes more than two
minutes to sketch a single frame.
CELL'S GENESIS FIVE YEARS AGO BEGAN WITH AN AUDAcious challenge. Sony's
new PlayStation 2 had just debuted, and Sony videogame chief Ken
Kutaragi was already looking ahead to the next version. He told IBM he
wanted a thousandfold increase in power. IBMers took up the dare, one
so bold that it challenged them to think beyond current chip designs.
"We knew we could never make the existing stuff go a thousand times
faster," says Hofstee.
In early 2000 Sony, Toshiba and IBM set up the STI Design Center,
housing it at an IBM site in Austin, Tex. James Kahle was put in
charge. Armed with only a bachelor's degree from Rice University,
Kahle, born in Venezuela and raised in New York, had joined IBM out of
school in 1983 to write software for designing next-generation chips.
His low-key, nice-guy style masks his intensity as a chip designer--his
work shows up in the Apple G3, G4 and G5 computers, the Nintendo
GameCube and IBM's biggest Unix servers; he calls some chips "my
grandchildren."
The project employed 450 engineers, mostly from IBM. They worked a lot,
socialized a little (group dinners, a few ski trips) and struggled with
the barriers of technology and physics--and of language and culture.
Weekly English classes were held for Japanese staffers. In
brainstorming sessions some Sony and Toshiba engineers had a penchant
for diplomacy and mulling every option; they found it jarring when
their IBM counterparts relied on instinct and blunt, bare-knuckled
debate.
Cell's creators needed to strike a balance between raw power and the
versatility to do more than just play games. Special graphics chips are
superspeedy, but for only one task. General-purpose chips like those
made by Intel devote a lot of muscle to the ability to handle a wide
variety of jobs, but they aren't superfast at any one of them. For two
decades Intel boosted performance by cramming more transistors onto a
chip, but now chips draw so much power and generate so much heat that
they can't be cranked up much more. Intel and others boost performance
by lashing together two or more thinking elements on a single chip.
Intel makes dual-core chips. Sun's Niagara boasts eight cores. For
Microsoft's Xbox 360, IBM linked three Power cores. But even these
multicore chips will not be powerful enough to drive the next wave,
Kahle argues. Cell needed an entirely new design.
Cell uses a single, central processing core that routes work to eight
tiny (but powerful) offspring called synergistic processing engines, or
SPEs. A year into development the engineers had a design ready but then
felt compelled to revise it because it would be too difficult for
developers outside the game business. "Game developers don't mind
working with a difficult chip, but we wanted to reach a wider
audience," says Michael Day, an IBM software engineer.
Months later they devised a new approach that drives Cell today. But
more hurdles arose. Engineers grappled with a highly complex
memory-management system that controls how bits of data are fed in and
out of the SPEs. For 16 weeks Kahle's staff would meet every morning at
9 a.m. to hash out the problem. "We came up with one design after
another and kept throwing them out and coming up with new designs. We
sat there for three or four hours a day. Sometimes we never got out,"
Hofstee says.
By April 2004 the first working chip came off the line at IBM's silicon
factory in East Fishkill, N.Y. The new Cell didn't deliver the 1,000X
gain that Sony wanted--but it did deliver 50X. Cell cranks out 200
billion floating-point operations per second (200 gigaflops). That is
akin to a full-fledged supercomputer in the late 1990s. Add an
Nvidia-designed graphics chip and PlayStation 3 runs 2 trillion
instructions per second.
By early last year Sony was sending out Cell prototypes and software
tools to get developers started on writing new games for PlayStation 3.
"We're seeing stuff that goes dramatically beyond what we can do with
the current generation [of games]," says Andrew Goldman, chief
executive of Pandemic Studios, a Los Angeles outfit that wrote a series
of popular Star Wars games for PlayStation 2. "And what you will see
over time is going to be even more amazing." He says it will take years
to fully exploit Cell's capabilities.
Last year IBM began its own evangelizing. Instead of revealing design
details to only a small number of potential partners sworn to secrecy,
IBM trumpeted Cell's secrets on the Internet, releasing 700 pages of
documents describing the new architecture and a 1,100-page development
kit, free for Internet download. "We've opened up the architecture and
provided all the details," Kahle says. "We want to see this
architecture proliferate in the marketplace."
The wooing is necessary, for Cell's "asymmetric" design (its eight
co-processors have a different architecture than the main core), though
key to the chip's superior performance, is also what makes writing
software for it so difficult. In the mainstream chip world designers
use an array of tool kits and high-level programming languages (such as
C++) to easily convert instructions into a form the chip can
comprehend. Such tools exist for Cell, but the chip's design is so
complex and so utterly different from anything before it that
code-crunchers do some of the work "down on the metal," cranking out
basic assembly code, which can take five times as long.
Selling Cell, Hofstee last year gave eight speeches at technical
conferences. He and Kahle have visited more than 50 companies, enduring
abundant skepticism from jaded industry veterans--until they ran their
speedy Cell demos. "It's just amazing to go meet with people who have
been in the industry for 25 years and just see their jaws drop," Kahle
says. When a famous chip designer, a veteran of Motorola and Apple,
visited Austin for a demo in 2004, Kahle showed him images from the
Mount Rainier flyover, eliciting stunned silence. "He just got really
quiet," as he realized "what this is going to do to the industry,"
Kahle says.
Toshiba demos a Cell-based "Magic Mirror" that turns an LCD screen into
a virtual mirror by combining feeds from several cameras. Look left,
look right and your "reflection" mimics you on screen, thanks to that
tiny Cell chip zipping away. In the next generation of TV sets Toshiba
hopes to lay the foundation for interactive viewing. One day you might
watch a football game from the quarterback's perspective and shift to a
seat up high on the 50-yard line, then zoom up to watch from the blimp
overhead, backflips that videogame players take in stride.
Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's lead designer on Cell, says Sony aims to use
this power to create movies that are interactive and changeable, with
multiple story lines, so people will watch the same flick more than
once. Another idea Sony is kicking around: placing ads in the
background of movies and TV shows and customizing them to suit the
viewer, with Cell processors keeping track of who sees what.
Breakthrough chips easily inspire such big ideas, but Cell enjoys a
running start that previous chips didn't have. It is likely to end up
in millions upon millions of homes around the world as the PlayStation
3 rolls out. Once these Cells throb away in game consoles, TV sets and
set-top boxes, they can be fed digital fare by new networks of
Cell-based servers. "As the clients become very powerful, then the
servers will have to become very powerful, too," Kahle says.
The PlayStation hook inspires confidence at Raytheon, the Waltham,
Mass. defense contractor, which has studied Cell for 15 months and
plans to use it in scores of next-generation systems. "Sonar, infrared
sensors--there are hundreds of products that Raytheon designs that
could use this type of technology," says Peter Pao, chief technology
officer. "Current chips are going to run out of steam. We always look
to the future."
At Mercury Computer Systems in Chelmsford, Mass. engineers are working
on a Cell system called Turismo, which is due later this year and will
pack up to 128 Cell chips into a 6-foot-high rack, producing up to 25
trillion calculations per second. Mercury, which sells modules for
medical gear made by General Electric, Philips and Siemens, says
Turismo could make a CT scanner so fast that it will be able to paint a
3-D image in four seconds versus five minutes on an Intel Pentium.
Mercury is even pushing Cell to firms that create computer-generated
special effects for movies. "This chip is opening doors for us," says
Joel Radford, a Mercury vice president.
Back in Austin Kahle talks about "immersive interaction," 3-D virtual
worlds modeled with such detail that you can see, from your screen,
exactly what it looks like when you're standing on the corner of Fifth
Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan. "This is going to open a whole new
realm of how people interact with computers and each other, where we'll
mix reality with virtual reality," he says. For his entire career Kahle
has been driven to create a chip that could change the world; now, he
says, it has arrived. "This project is the culmination of that desire."
The good news: Some designers say creating games for Cell is far less
complicated than writing for PlayStation 2. "Anyone who worked on the
PlayStation 2 is jumping for joy," says Jeremy Gordon, chief executive
of Secret Level, a gamemaker in San Francisco that is remaking a
classic 1980s Sega videogame for the new Sony box.
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0130/076.html?partner=yahoomag
even...@hotmail.com
Fish! - of Arcadia.
nvidi...@mail.com says...
> On The Cover/Top Stories
> Holy Chip!
> Daniel Lyons, 01.30.06
>
>
> The good news: Some designers say creating games for Cell is far less
> complicated than writing for PlayStation 2. "Anyone who worked on the
> PlayStation 2 is jumping for joy," says Jeremy Gordon, chief executive
> of Secret Level, a gamemaker in San Francisco that is remaking a
> classic 1980s Sega videogame for the new Sony box.
>
>
> http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0130/076.html?partner=yahoomag
>
>
Oooh, look bullshit speculation written for the layman, how very err
dumbed down.
--
"Cocaine's a hell of a drug" - Rick James
Phil Da Lick!
> years. The Cell chip, based on a design inspired by supercomputers,
> runs at least ten times as fast as Intel's most powerful Pentium. More
Over 30GHz? Wow. I'm officially impressed.
NV55
PS3 version of Cell actually has less clockspeed than the fastest
Pentium
3.2GHz Cell vs 3.8GHz P4
Radeon
my my, Cell has become a lot LESS IMRESSIVE than it was said to be.
Over 3 years ago, Cell was supposed to be 100 times faster (in fp math
not ghz) than a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-948493.html
_____________________________
"What's behind Cell?
While the processor's design is still under wraps, the companies say
Cell's capabilities will allow it to deliver one trillion calculations
per second (teraflop) or more of floating-point calculations. It will
have the ability to do north of 1 trillion mathematical calculations
per second, roughly 100 times more than a single Pentium 4 chip running
at 2.5GHz."
_____________________________
Hidar...@sympatico.ca
> NV55 wrote:
> > years. The Cell chip, based on a design inspired by supercomputers,
> > runs at least ten times as fast as Intel's most powerful Pentium. More
That's disappointing. The Emotion Engine was supposed to outperform
supercomputers, whereas the Emotion Engine 2... errr... the Cell
processor is only based on supercomputers. Does this mean that the PS4
will be hyped as being less powerful than a supercomputer, since that's
where Sony consoles end up anyways?
Btw, I'm not sure if the OP is stupid or just incredibly dense, but the
XBox and the XBox 360 are made by Microsoft. They have nothing to do
with Sony. Neither does the Dreamcast, the Saturn, the Genesis, nor
any other Sega console, since Sega is not owned by Sony. And when Sega
develops games for the PS3, like they're currently doing for other
consoles, it won't be fitting the fanboy speculation which is based on
corporate overhype, but on the actual hardware which never lives up to
Sony hype. The wet dreams of idiot trolls is the only place where
games meeting the speculations of the OP will surface over the next few
years.
Air Raid
based on Sony's old roadmap from 1999....
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19991006S0040
(not a quote, the link is only to back up what I'm saying below)
Emotion Engine 2 was supposed to be a workstation-only chip based on
an 'enhanced' Emotion Engine architecture, and was due out in 2002.
Again, the EE2 was intended for workstations, not Playstations.
The EE2 has never been seen.
Emotion Engine 3 was supposed to be a workstation *and* PlayStation CPU
using a totally new architecture, and was due out in 2005 or 2006. it
was to be PS3's CPU. The EE3 was either never seen, or the EE3 *is*
the Cell, only Cell is indeed far less powerful than what Sony was
planning in 1999-2000, be it EE3 or Cell.
Hidar...@sympatico.ca
The Emotion Engine was USED to fuel the hype for the PS2. The Cell is
being used to fuel the hype of the PS3. The hype was offering more
than what was actually delivered with the PS2, with the Emotion Engine
being attributed as what would make that hype a reality. And the hype
surrounding the Cell seems equally unrealistic, and 100% unproven.
So regardless of what plans Sony had for processors with the Emotion
Engine name, the Cell only has the name seperating that from an Emotion
Engine followup, for how the name is used with the public and media.
That's the only connection I was making.
Air Raid
PlayStation2 in 1999 and 2000.
the Cell has been used to hype the PlayStation3 since 2001 when Cell
was announced, and the hype reached its height in 2005 when Cell was
fully unvieled at ISSCC and PlayStation3 was partly unvieled at E3.
Cell is being hyped like the Emotion Engine was, only on a wider basis.
btw, Sony never said Emotion Engine and PlayStation2 could produce Toy
Story graphics (that was the press) Sony went further, and said PS2
would deliever graphics that look like film / real life which is better
than Toy Story. and now its the same thing with Cell and PlayStation
3, they're saying it will deliver graphics that look like films.
which is complete nonsense.
Blig Merk
take on 3 different split personality identities for your own thread -
Air Raid, NV55 and Radeon. Why didn't you throw Xenon in there for good
measure. Again, you so called 'reference' is an old speculation
article, which means nothing once again.
The many psycho-schizo split personalities of Cyg-anus:
CygnusX-1
video-game dude
Air Raid
multi-core
Radeon
Radeon350
NV50
NV55
R420
R500
R520
Xenon
MS Will Destroy Sony Computer Entertainment
and probably half a dozen others