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Cell Processors


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I read about it in "Business 2.0" Volume 6, Number 5, June 2005.

 

There is an insert where they talk about which companies have been doing what for multi-core chips (pg 114 if you care), here is a quote:

IBM  In addition to the nine-core Cell chip, it's developing a three-core chip for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and is rumored to be working on a multicore chip for the next Nintendo console.

Now, they include a nifty stylized view of the processor a couple pages back, and it looks like there's 8 specialized cores and 1 "master processor" that distributes the work to each core. So, depending on how you look at it, it could be considered eight or nine.

 

EDIT: This will make the overclockers excited...

Then one senior engineer, impatient with the pace of the testing, yelled, "Crank it up!" They got the chip up to 5.6 gigahertz before its voltage regulator popped. (it was desigent to operate at between 3 and 4 gigahertz.)

Cell processors :wub:

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The cell is not a general pupose processor and both the Cell and the custom Power PC chip in the Xbox 360 are missing manythings that x86 processors have.

 

PC processors are better at general purpose tasks and have alot of specialized parts for backwards compatability.

 

When you build a processor to do specific things and throw out backwards compatability, you get an incredibly fast processor, for doing those specific things it was designed to do.

 

This is nothing new. Optimize a 3d rendering engine to run on the fastest Athlon 64 in existance, and it will be far slower than if you ran it on a 3 year old video card.

 

As for the 9 vs. 8 core cell, there are 9 physical cores, one highly chopped down PPC general purpose core similar to the cores in the Xbox 360 and 8 SPUs. In the PS3 one of the 8 SPUs is disabled. The can get better yeilds this way, and 7 SPUs is good enough.

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