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nightsurge on 24 November 2009
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joeorc said:
jetrii said:
joeorc said:
jetrii said:
The current Cell processor design is pretty much dead. SPEs do not make sense anymore and IBM knows this. The new generation of Cell processors will be a few Power7 cores that manage a few thousand stream processors. Even if they call it "Cell", it is a completely different architecture. Granted, it will definitely borrow a few technologies from the current cell, but it will simply be a different processor with the same name.

This those effect the PS4, as it means that backwards compatibility is pretty much dead. If developers thought that porting games to the cell processor was bad, they are going to struggle even more with stream processors. Emulating a Cell with stream processors + a few cores is not hard, but it requires more power than will be available in the next generation of consoles.

lol..

no its not! dead, god!

you are making my head hurt..you do know that the Cell Processor 

"is a streaming processor"

as a matter of fact "the cell is a stream processor with embedded ram on the die"

talk about taking a new's scoop and blowing it way out of proportion.

 

You have no idea what you are talking about. The Cell processor can be used to stream process data, but it is not a stream processor in the OpenCL context. They sound the same, but there are distinctions. Lets compare the Cell to a modern GPU. The cell has 1 PPE and 8 SPE. A Radeon HD 5070 has 1,600 stream processors. Stream processors are tiny and they do nothing but execute mathematical operations on sets of data. The SPEs in the Cell processor are gimped CPU cores. They can do MUCH more than the stream processors and they do it much faster. However, it's 1 PPE + SPE against thousands of stream processors. The stream processors completely outperform the Cell processor.

 

Highest performing cell right now : 0.5 Teraflops

Highest performing GPU right now : 6.5+ Teraflops with 3,200+ stream processors.

 

There is no comparison.

me..have no idea what i am taliking about?

that's rich.

the Cell processor is a stream processor, pure and simple that's a fact. gimped core's. god you are just as thick as the "if it's not x86" is crap for game's. that very way of thinking is what stunt's growth in computing.

you have a one track mind my friend just stop. 

while i respect you I do not happen to agree with your take on how and which processor is classed in your IDEA what a stream processor is or is not.

The Cell processor from STI, an alliance of Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba Corporation, and IBM, is a hardware architecture that can function like a stream processor with appropriate software support. It consists of a controlling processor, the PPE (Power Processing Element, an IBM PowerPC) and a set of SIMD coprocessors, called SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements), each with independent program counters and instruction memory, in effect a MIMD machine. In the native programming model all DMA and program scheduling is left up to the programmer. The hardware provides a fast ring bus among the processors for local communication. Because the local memory for instructions and data is limited the only programs that can exploit this architecture effectively either require a tiny memory footprint or adhere to a stream programming model. With a suitable algorithm the performance of the Cell can rival that of pure stream processors, however this nearly always requires a complete redesign of algorithms and software.

He is right.  It is NOT a stream processor.  It can only act like one with very complicated and reworked software support.  True stream processors combined in mass in the structure of say a GPU will always be superior to the Cell unless the Cell structure were to add more PPE and LOTS more SPEs.

And I have no idea where you even got this "if it's not x86 its crap for games" statement.  When was this even something people believed?  5 years ago?  x64 is clearly the best choice for pretty much anything within the last few years and from this point on.  Or perhaps this statement is so foreign and aged that I do not know what exactly it is referring to?