THE CELL BROADBAND ENGINE

THE POWER OF THE CELL BROADBAND ENGINE

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• THE
• CELL
• BROADBAND
• ENGINE

[RiotFalls]

@NewLynxChannel this video too, really? what is your obsession with this piece of hardware that u have dedicated around a YEAR of time trolling up the comments section in several of these "cell" videos? do u have a life man, there is other things to do on the net other than troll.

im actually laughing right now, i have never seen something like this in my life, troll dedication that is.

and dont lie to these kids, u make half the shit u say up because know they wont be check your credibility.

[SirMetalGH]

I take it you have an AMD or Intel processor? Well Those processors are completely different in design to the Cell Broadband Engine, I don't know where you get this "20%" faster thing from, but it's not true. The Cell can even kick the Core I7's ass if the code was optimised for it.

[NewLynxS]

@murder00redrum You're the guy who messaged me recently, right? Heads up here, this conversation was not taking the most correct directions.

[NewLynxS]

@RiotFalls Continued...

Finally, Cell is absolutely not "decent" as a GPU. Sure, the nature of the SPEs (being parallel SIMD units like those used as stream processors on GPUs) allows Cell to perform reasonably well on shader-related tasks, like vector processing and post-processing effects. But it lacks other specialized structures GPUs have, like ROPs and TMUs, which means it achieves very low fillrates and, consequently, awful performance when handling the entire rendering process alone.

[NewLynxS]

@RiotFalls Continued...

Murder00redrum was right, EIB connect structures INSIDE Cell's die. It is not the external bus to the XDR RAM, which has nothing to do with EIB and has a maximum bandwidth of 25.6 GB/s (at 400 MHz).

SPEs are not cores, they are parallel SIMD units. They have no cache, no direct access to the system memory, a much more limited instruction set and can only run vectorized instructions, which geatly limits what they can do compared to an actual core such as the PPE.

[NewLynxS]

@RiotFalls Continued...

Also, you cannot use RAM as cache. First, because cache needs a much higher bandwidth.Second, because unike RAM, cache isn't just storagei it needs additional logic units to predict which data to load and keep stored. Third, cache is not addressable by software, while RAM must be. And fourth, cache must be inside the CPU die to eliminate the latency that comes from having to use external buses.

[NewLynxS]

@RiotFalls It's really funny you say I don't know what I'm taking about, and then you post comments like those.

First of all, the XDR RAM is not cocked at 3.2 GHz, it's clocked at 400 MHz. Since it transfers eight bits per cycle, that makes a transfer rate of 3.2 GT/s (gigatranfers per second), NOT 3.2 GHz. In a similar way as DDR3-1600 RAM (two transfers per cycle) is clocked at 800 MHz (1600 MT/s or 1.6 GT/s), not 1600 MHz.

[RiotFalls]

@murder00redrum [Continued]

and the reason i say it sucks as a CPU is because there are things way better, the cells performance today compared to hex-core cpu's is dwarfed and they have all the extras that the cell has external all tucked inside and easier to use. back in 2006 the cell looked real good on paper but when used in applications it was comparable to the intel atom CPU performance wise, but if the device has RAM thats usable by the cell it can get a performance and usability boost.

[RiotFalls]

@murder00redrum i'll look in my browsers history for the link and send it via PM, it was months ago

even though the cell can set its SPE's to work as cores with external cache, its still slower and requires extra specific instruction sets. the cell has only been used for half a decade with average level applications, most programmers who have coded for it even to this day don't know if will "show promise" or if it will "die out" for average consumer use now that ARM processors are advancing.

[murder00redrum]

@RiotFalls Well i can't verify what you have told me. But i have a question, why isnt this cpu the best out there then. You yourself said it sucks as a cpu. Why so it if all the SPE's can be easily used as general purpose cores using the EIB(which fyi i thought was inside the CPU not used to connect it with outside resources).

[RiotFalls]

@murder00redrum the SPE's become cores when used by applications coded with a instruction set that uses RAM as cache but the RAM has to be the same frequency as the SPE's. the ps3 has 256MB XDRAM clocked at 3.2GHz and the cell clocked at 3.2GHz. the SPE's can use the XDRAM as cache because of the EIB and its fast/direct connection to that memory pool

the SPE's have external cache available for use, so you cannot say there not cores

go tell IBM and mercury computer systems that their wrong troll!

[murder00redrum]

@RiotFalls To be called a CORE the spe's NEED CACHE. Which they doesn't have so don't tell me i fail. Do some research bud. Hahaha decent as a GPU? Bud both of my GPU's have 336 of those little dinky processors that run in parallel. That are only good at floating point arithmetic. Which is why, yes, the cell sucks as a cpu. Well gosh maybe Sony put the word CORE on the box so people whould have some idea as the wth is it. Would it be smart to put *1 IBM bases power PC Cpu and 6 SPE's* ?