| Fernando said: Dude... it's a much better Cell processor. The Cell processor is not only a Sony product. In fact, its a very modified Cell processor, called IBM PowerXCell: In May 2008, IBM introduced the high-performance double-precision floating-point version of the Cell processor, the PowerXCell 8i, at the 65 nm feature size. But the main power comes from the AMD Processors. The PowerXCells is just to accelerate the speed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner "IBM Roadrunner uses an updated version of the Cell processor, manufactured using 65 nm technology and enhanced SPUs that can handle double precision calculations in the 128-bit registers, reaching double precision 100 GFLOPs" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor#Supercomputing |
Actually, the Roadrunner has 6 480 dual core AMD Opteron processors and 12 960 Cell processors; the Opterons handle file and network I/O and basic calculations, while the Cell processors take care of the heavy duty scientific calculations, I suspect especially floating point calculations since that's what the Cell excels in. In total, the Roadrunner has 116 640 processor cores and 51.8 TB of RAM for the Opterons and 51.8 TB or RAM for the Cells. Pretty hefty amount of memory, I'd say. The Roadrunner runs on Linux, I wonder if anybody will try running, say, Crysis via Wine there? ;)
