48 mpeg2 streams simultaneously with Cell processor

[thoughton]

When are we going to get these in our computers?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050502-4872.html

[Xylob the Destroyer]

PlayStation 3!

[bugster]

Look beyond the hype and this is nothing special.

They used 8 cell processors for this, runinga at some unspecified clock rate but no doubt fast. I seem to remember reading somewhere that these things can clock at 4Ghz+. A modern PC (P4 3Ghz) bareley breaks into a sweat decoding DVD quality mpeg2, so with 8 3Ghz P4's and some specialised software (without Windows or any other mainstream OS) could probably do the same.

Impressive demo? probably.
Special? No.

[thoughton]

Hrm ... the way I read the article it's actually 1 cell processor which has 8 cores (the 'SPEs'). 6 of the cores are decoding 8 mpeg2 streams each, 1 is handling the scaling, and 1 is sitting there twiddling its thumbs

(And I guess the cell processor also has a controlling powerpc core which is doing something else entirely.)

Edit: They also say in the article that each SPE can indivually decode 1080i mpeg2.

[bugster]

Hrm ... the way I read the article it's actually 1 cell processor which has 8 cores

One piece of silicon with 8 CPU's versus 8 pieces of silicon with 1 CPU each, same difference.

Edit: They also say in the article that each SPE can indivually decode 1080i mpeg2.

So can a P4 or an athlon.
Dual cores are here, Quads in a year or so.

Again, the Cell may be 'interesting', but its not going to take over the world.

[thoughton]

Hrm ... the way I read the article it's actually 1 cell processor which has 8 cores

One piece of silicon with 8 CPU's versus 8 pieces of silicon with 1 CPU each, same difference.

Hmm it seems obvious to me there is a difference. Using your logic no one would bother with dual core CPUs, they would just use 2 CPUs instead...

[bugster]

Hrm ... the way I read the article it's actually 1 cell processor which has 8 cores

One piece of silicon with 8 CPU's versus 8 pieces of silicon with 1 CPU each, same difference.

Hmm it seems obvious to me there is a difference. Using your logic no one would bother with dual core CPUs, they would just use 2 CPUs instead...

Yes there is a difference when multiple cpus are needed. Forgetting cost, power supplies and heat dissipation, multiple cores on single silicon allow faster interprocessor communications. So when multiple CPU's need to pass data between them, the bottleneck is reduced. But what I am saying is an 8 core Cell is nothing special compared to an 8 CPU P4 or Athlon (wether multiple cores or several single cores) in terms of overall MIPS. The architecture of Cell may well lend itself well to certain types of processing, and it does look like an interesting departure from the norm. But will we be running them on our desktops and in our servers in a few years time? I don't think so

[thoughton]

We're clearly destined to disagree

Given the likely price point of the PS3 (how much can it be? $400 tops?), even taking into account the fact that Sony will be losing money on each one sold, the cell looks (to me) like it will run circles around a P4 or Athlon. Sure, we can talk about eight P4's matching the cell's speed, but P4's cost a couple hundred bucks each...