Brian Cassil Posted May 10, 2006 Share Posted May 10, 2006 This may seem a OT but I do wonder about the possible impact this could eventually have on rendering. I was listening to a short report on E3 on NPR yesterday afternoon and some guy was raving about the playstation 3 and specifically its processing power. He said it used technology that trickled down from IBM mainframes and that it had 9(!) processors. I did a quick search to get a little more info on what the hardware specs are and found this: CPU: Cell Processor PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz 1 VMX vector unit per core 512KB L2 cache 7 x SPE @3.2GHz 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE * 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPSNone of that makes much sense to me but maybe it does to others out there. It looks to me like 7 processors not 9 though like the guy on the radio said, but still, that sounds like a whole lot of processing power for $500! So my question to someone who is more technically savvy than I: How does this compare to the latest typical render machines we are getting lately like a dual/dual core opteron? Also, could this ever be harnessed for rendering with typical 3D software? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted May 11, 2006 Share Posted May 11, 2006 Yeah, this does look pretty sweet. It's set up a lot like a parallel supercomputer in a simplified design. The PowerPC is a newer 64-bit variety that can do normal tasks, and the SPEs (the S stands for Synergy - damn I hate that word) are 128-bit vector units with a highly simplified RISC architecture (a new architecture, not Altivec) and a very simple pipeline. The 256K per core is more like RAM than cache - it's addressable in software. You could run your software on the PowerPC and have the SPEs kick in when you want to do a complex parallelizable task - this would probably be ideal for rendering, if the bus bandwidth is good enough. But this architecture is nothing like your standard Intel or even PowerPC platform, it would need a very different chipset and OS kernel because the memory handling would be so different, and ideally the software should be written to work in 128-bit data. I'd guess somebody's already working on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luckytohaveher Posted May 12, 2006 Share Posted May 12, 2006 There are several online articles that explain the inner workings. The official IBM story... http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/power/splash/cell Example... http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39256676,00.htm So a Seven Blade rack would offer 3 Teraflops of rendering power! 3T -- What the heck would you do with that? One take... http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars Or... http://www.cellsupercomputer.com Should be interesting once someone ports a rendering engine to it... VRAY, Brazil, Discreet... You listening? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Devin Johnston Posted May 12, 2006 Share Posted May 12, 2006 From what I've read the cell processor is totally different in the way it works than the standard Intel or AMD chip. That means that the application has to be written especially for that chip and it's not the easiest thing to do. I don't see software makers adapting their software to run on these types of chips unless they become mainstream in PC's because there would be no real market for this adaptation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hazdaz Posted May 14, 2006 Share Posted May 14, 2006 Stop believing the typical SONY hyperbole. The PS3 is gonna be really no more powerful than the existing X-Box 360, yet because of SONY's non-stop marketing company, people are actually buying into this whole "supercomputer" BS. Ugh. And for the price of each unit - $500 and $600 - it won't make a decent rendering farm (not that it is possible yet) for quite a while. But even if/when it gets hacked, the small amount of memory would greatly hamper it's use. I am sure it is going to be powerful, but I soooo hate SONY's BS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted May 14, 2006 Share Posted May 14, 2006 Heh. All of the video game console partisanship isn't really an issue here - we're not really talking about getting a PS3 to run a render engine, it only gets interesting if there is CG software for something like the Cell Blade. Forget Sony, MS and video games - Cell has the potential to run circles around what we have now, if it can be used properly (by IBM). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
luckytohaveher Posted May 15, 2006 Share Posted May 15, 2006 I am not sure what the actual implications are as I am not a software engineer writting light/rendering software. However, there is one really interesting architectural difference with the platform. The 8 SPEs, sub process units, can be serialized. This means a complex task like rendering may be able to cut up into special sub tasks and done one right after the other. This could get interesting... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted May 15, 2006 Share Posted May 15, 2006 LOL, I can't believe so many people got duped into Sony's Media hogwash... haha.... When PS2 came out Sony touted as the best thing since Jesus Christ himself !! THE EMOTION ENGINE!... Sony's media blitz was so successful in making people believing how powerful their PS2 is that Clinton even forbid export to China and other potential enemy nations for fear of nuclear proliferation.. LOL... But looking back now, everyone would agree PS2 is no more powerful than a standard desktop PC...with much less RAM.. So, don't get wash over by the hype... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Cassil Posted May 15, 2006 Author Share Posted May 15, 2006 Sony's media blitz was so successful in making people believing how powerful their PS2 is that Clinton even forbid export to China and other potential enemy nations for fear of nuclear proliferation.. LOL... That is pretty funny. And people accuse Bush of being paranoid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard McCarthy Posted May 16, 2006 Share Posted May 16, 2006 Yeh, back then it was pretty crazy, some rumour has it that Clinton accuse Saddam of buying 200 of these PS2! They were afraid these PS2 "super computers" were been networked for use on Simulated Nuclear Testing..... I guess now it was all proven to be untrue... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now