Final-Fan said:
jetrii said:
Final-Fan said:
But ... no, that's not what I thought you meant. If some people choose to use the PS3 Cell solution due to its cheaper price, and feel that that's a fair tradeoff even for certain big, important projects, can you really call it "outdated"? That's what I'm saying.
The B-52 bomber has been in use by the USAF since 1955. They keep extending its service because it's so goddamned useful. The latest supposed expiration date is 2040. Its technology is certainly not comparable to the B-1, but it hasn't been replaced by its superior successor. Is it "outdated"?
"That is why it can complete in the marketplace, because it's not outdated compared to other chips, however, it is outdated in its class."
I guess I could be wrong here, but isn't it competing in the same arena as the Cell supercomputers? Please correct me if that's not the case. |
Of course it is. If someone wants to use a 2Ghz Core Solo solution due to its cheaper price, and feel that it's a fair tradeoff even for certain big, important projects, can you really call it "outdated?" Yes, of course you can. It is definetely outdated, there are just people that feel like they can use it for something useful. Something outdated can still be useful.
We can go back and forth on this all night. What I consider to be outdated isn't what you consider to be outdated. Lets just agree to disagree.
Btw, that above example is true, I use a few Core Solo machines to do some pretty important things that don't require too much processing power but are still very important. |
Just one last thing -- in your example, you have the cheap processor because you aren't actually using it for the processing power, so ANY processor will do. With these supercomputer calculations, though, it's ALL about the processing power, that's the entire POINT (right?). So although your example is interesting, I don't think it's really on point.
Now, if you were using that Core Solo processor to do something that would take a week for it to crunch (completely made up timeframe) for the cost savings over a processor that would take two days to crunch the same job (made up again), and the cost savings was a fair trade for you, then that would be an equivalent situation IMO.
But I'm OK with letting the argument itself drop, I just had a side issue with the last example you put forth.
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I'll add this final note then end this argument: The Playstation 3 is limited in what it can do as each system only has 256MB of memory available to it. There are tasks that don't require much memory and instead require many simple calculations done over and over again. This is something which the PS3 can be used for. However, why bother with a 200Gigaflop PS3 when for the same price one can buy a 2.4 Teraflop GPU with 800 stream processors? There are tasks which GPUs are not fit for but most of the PS3 projects I've seen involve tasks which a GPU can do much more efficiently for much less.
I don't know if you've read what I posted, but at work we skipped the Cell processor in favor of GPUs for our project. Each of our servers has a theoretical performance of 4.8 Teraflops with 2 dual GPU cards. The $400 dollar GPU provides around 8X more performance than the PS3(We were actually using IBM Cell blades so it would have been much more expensive.)
Perhaps this is why I am not impressed by the Cell processor that much. It is an amazing processor, I won't deny it, but I feel that it's been eclipsed by GPUs already. Now, if Nvidia and AMD would finish those improved GPGPU architectures, my life would be complete.
