The 2005 ISSCC

Cell Architecture Explained: Introduction

Introduction

Designed for the PlayStation 3, Sony, Toshiba and IBM's new "Cell processor"
promises seemingly obscene computing capabilities for what will rapidly
become a very low price. In these articles I look at what the Cell
architecture is, then I go on to look at the profound implications this new
chip has, not for the games market, but for the entire computer industry.
Has the PC finally met it's match?

To date the details disclosed by the STI group (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) have
been very vague to say the least. Except that is for the patent application
which describes the system in minute detail. Unfortunately this is very
difficult to read so the details haven't made it out into general
circulation even in the technical community.

I have managed to decipher the patent and in parts 1 and 2 I describe the
details of the Cell architecture, from the cell processor to the "software
cells" it operates on.

Cell is a vector processing architecture and this in some way limits it's
uses, that said there are a huge number of tasks which can benefit from
vector processing and in part 3 I look at them.

The first machine on the market with a Cell processor will steal the
performance crown from the PC, probably permanently, but PCs have seen much
bigger and better competition in the past and have pushed it aside every
time. In part 4 I explain why the PC has always won and why the Cell may
have the capacity to finally defeat it.

In part 5 I wrap it up with a conclusion and list of references. If you
don't want to read all the details in parts 1 and 2 I give a short overview
of the Cell architecture.



Part 1: Inside The Cell

In Parts 1 and 2 I look at what the Cell Architecture is. Part 1 covers the
computing hardware in the Cell processor.

  a.. Background
  b.. So what is Cell Architecture?
  c.. The Processor Unit (PU)
  d.. Attached Processor Units (APUs)
  e.. APU Local Memory
Part 2: Again Inside The Cell

Part 2 continues the look at the insides of the Cell, I look at the setup
for stream processing then move on to the other parts of the Cell hardware
and software architecture.

  a.. Stream Processing
  b.. Hard Real Time Processing
  c.. The DMAC
  d.. Memory
  e.. Software Cells
  f.. Multi-Cell'd Animals
  g.. DRM In The Hardware
  h.. Other Options And The Future
Part 3: Cellular Computing

Cells are not like normal CPUs and their main performance gains will come
from the vector processing APUs, in this section I look at the type of
applications which will benefit from the Cells power.

  a.. Cell Applications
  b.. Games
  c.. 3D Graphics
  d.. Video
  e.. Audio
  f.. DSP (Digital Signal Processing)
  g.. SETI
  h.. Scientific
  i.. Super Computing
  j.. Servers
  k.. Stream Processing Applications
  l.. Non Accelerated Applications
Part 4: Cell Vs the PC

x86 PCs own almost the entire computer market despite the fact there have
been many other platforms which were superior in many ways. In this section
I look at how the PC has come to dominate and why the Cell may be able to
knock the king from his throne.

  a.. The Sincerest Form of Flattery is Theft
  b.. Cell V's x86
  c.. Cell V's Software
  d.. Attack
  e.. Cell V's Apple
  f.. Cell V's GPU
  g.. The Cray Factor
  h.. The Result
Part 5: Conclusion and References

  a.. Short Overview
  b.. Conclusion
  c.. References And Further Reading



__


[1]


Cell Architecture Explained - Part 1: Inside The Cell

Getting the details on Cell is not that easy. The initial announcements were
vague to say the least and it wasn't until a patent [Cell Patent] appeared
that any details appeared, most people wouldn't have noticed this but the
inquirer ran a story on it [INQ].

Unfortunately the patent reads like it was written by a robotic lawyer
running Gentoo in text mode, you don't so much read it as decipher it. On
top of this the patent does not give the details of what the final system
will look like though it does describe a number of different options.

With the recent announcements about a new Cell workstation and some details
[Recent Details] and specifications [Specs] being revealed it's now possible
to have a look at how a Cell based system may look like in the flesh.

The patent is a long and highly confusing document but I think I've managed
to understand it sufficiently to describe the system. It's important to note
though that the actual Cell processors may be different from the description
I give as the patent does not describe everything and even if it did things
can and do change.


Background

Although it's been primarily touted as the technology for the PlayStation 3,
Cell is designed for much more. Sony and Toshiba, both being major
electronics manufacturers buy in all manner of different components, one of
the reasons for Cell's development is they want to save costs by building
their own components. Next generation consumer technologies such as BluRay,
HDTV, HD Camcorders and of course the PS3 will all require a very high level
of computing power and this is going to need chips to provide it. Cell will
be used for all of these and more, IBM will also be using the chips in
servers and they can also be sold to 3rd party manufacturers [3rd party].

Sony and Toshiba previously co-operated on the PlayStation 2 but this time
the designs are a more aggressive and required the help of a third partner
to help design and manufacture the new chips. IBM brings not only it's chip
design expertise but also it's industry leading silicon process and their
ability to get things to work - when even the biggest chip firms in the
industry have problems it's IBM who get the call to come and help. the
companies they've helped is a who's who of the semiconductor industry.

The amount of money being spent on this project is vast, two 65nm chip
fabrication facilities are being built at billions each and Sony has paid
IBM hundreds of millions to set up a production line in Fishkill. Then
there's a few hundred million on development - all before a single chip
rolls of the production lines.


So, what is Cell Architecture

Cell is an architecture for high performance distributed computing. It is
comprised of hardware and software Cells, software Cells consist of data and
programs (known as apulets), these are sent out to the hardware Cells where
they are computed and results returned.

This architecture is not fixed in any way, if you have a computer, PS3 and
HDTV which have Cell processors they can co-operate on problems. They've
been talking about this sort of thing for years of course but the Cell is
actually designed to do it. I for one quite like the idea of watching
"Contact" on my TV while a PS3 sits in the background churning through a
SETI@home [SETI] unit every 5 minutes. If you know how long a SETI unit
takes your jaw should have just hit the floor, suffice to say, Cells are
very, very fast [SETI Calc].

It can go further though, there's no reason why your system can't distribute
software Cells over a network or even all over the world. The Cell is
designed to fit into everything from PDAs up to servers so you can make an
ad-hoc Cell computer out of completely different systems.

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell_Distributed.gif





caling is just one capability of Cell, the individual systems are going to
be potent enough on their own. The single unit of computation in a Cell
system is called a Processing Element (PE) and even an individual PE is one
hell of a powerful processor, they have a theoretical computing capability
of 250 GFLOPS (Billion Floating Point Operations per Second) [GFLOPS]. In
the computing world quoted figures (bandwidth, processing, throughput) are
often theoretical maximums and rarely if ever met in real life. Cell may be
unusual in that given the right type of problem they may actually be able to
get close to their maximum computational figure.

Specifications

An individual Processing Element (i.e. Hardware Cell) is made up of a number
of elements:

  a.. 1 Processing Unit (PU)
  b.. 8 X Attached Processing Units (APUs)
  c.. Direct memory Access Controller DMAC
  d.. Input/Output (I/O) Interface

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell_Arch.gif






The full specifications haven't been given out yet but some details [Specs]
are out there:

  a.. 4.6 GHz
  b.. 1.3v
  c.. 85 Celcius operation with heat sink
  d.. 6.4 Gigabit / second off-chip communication
All those internal processing units need to be fed so a high speed memory
and I/O system is an absolute necessity. for this purpose Sony and Toshiba
have licensed the high speed "Yellowstone" and "Redwood" technologies from
Rambus [Rambus], the 6.4 Gb/s I/O was also designed in part by Rambus.


The Processor Unit (PU)

As we now know [Recent Details] the PU is a 64bit "Power Architecture"
processor. Power Architecture is a catch all term IBM have been using for a
while to describe both PowerPC and POWER processors. Currently there's only
3 CPUs which fit this description: POWER5, POWER4 and the PowerPC 970 (aka
G5) which itself is a derivation of the POWER4.

The IBM press release indicates the Cell processor is "Multi-thread,
multi-core" but since the APUs are almost certainly not multi-threaded it
looks like the PU may be based on a POWER5 core - the very same core I
expect to turn up in Apple machines in the form of the G6 [G6] in the not
too distant future, IBM have acknowledged such a chip is in development but
as if to confuse us call it a "next generation 970".

There is of course the possibility that IBM have developed a completely
different 64 bit CPU which it's never mentioned before. This isn't a far
fetched idea as this is exactly the sort of thing IBM tend to do, i.e. the
440 CPU used in the BlueGene supercomputer is still called a 440 but is very
different from the chip you find in embedded systems.

If the PU is based on a POWER design don't expect it to run at a high clock
speed, POWER cores tend to be rather power hungry so it may be clocked down
to keep power consumption down.

The PlayStation 3 is touted to have 4 Cells so a system could potential have
4 POWER5 based cores. This sounds pretty amazing until you realise that the
PUs are really just controllers - the real action is in the APUs...


Attached Processor Units (APU)

Each Cell contains 8 APUs. An APU is a self contained vector processor which
acts independently from the others. They contain 128 X 128 bit registers,
there are also 4 floating point units capable of 32 GigaFlops and 4 Integer
units capable of 32 GOPS (Billions of Operations per Second). The APUs also
include a small 128 Kilobyte local memory instead of a cache, there is also
no virtual memory system used at runtime.

Independent processing
The APUs are not coprocessors, they are complete independent processors in
their own right. The PU sets them up with a software Cell and then "kicks"
them into action. Once running the APU executes the apulet in the software
Cell until it is complete or it is told to stop. The PU sets up the APUs
using Remote Procedure calls, these are not sent sent directly to the APUs
but rather sent via the DMAC which also performs any memory reads or writes
required.

Vector processing
The APUs are vector [Vector] (or SIMD) processors, that is they do multiple
operations simultaneously with a single instruction. Vector computing has
been used in supercomputers since the 1970s and modern CPUs have media
accelerators (e.g. SSE, AltiVec) which work on the same principle. Each APU
appears to be capable of 4 X 32 bit operations per cycle, (8 if you count
multiply-adds). In order to work, the programs run will need to be
"vectorised", this can be done in many application areas such as video,
audio, 3D graphics and many scientific areas.

AltiVec?
It has been speculated that the vector units are the same as the AltiVec
units found in the PowerPC G4 and G5 processors. I consider this highly
unlikely as there are several differences. Firstly the number of registers
is 128 instead of AltiVec's 32, secondly the APUs use a local memory whereas
AltiVec does not, thirdly Altivec is an add-on to the existing PowerPC
instruction set and operates as part of a PowerPC processor, the APUs are
completely independent processors. There will no doubt be a great similarity
between the two but don't expect any direct compatibility. It should however
be relatively simple to convert between the two.



http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell_APU.gif





APU Local memory

The lack of cache and virtual memory systems means the APUs operate in a
different way from conventional CPUs. This will likely make them harder to
program but they have been designed this way to reduce complexity and
increase performance.

Conventional Cache
Conventional CPUs perform all their operations in registers which are
directly read from or written to main memory, operating directly on main
memory is hundreds of times slower so caches (a fast on chip memory of
sorts) are used to hide the effects of going to or from main memory. Caches
work by storing part of the memory the processor is working on, if you are
working on a 1MB piece of data it is likely only a small fraction of this
(perhaps a few hundred bytes) will be present in cache, there are kinds of
cache design which can store more or even all the data but these are not
used as they are too expensive or too slow.

If data being worked on is not present in the cache the CPU stalls and has
to wait for this data to be fetched. This essentially halts the processor
for hundreds of cycles. It is estimated that even high end server CPUs
(POWER, Itanium, typically with very large fast caches) spend anything up to
80% of their time waiting for memory.

Dual-core CPUs will become common soon and these usually have to share the
cache. Additionally, if either of the cores or other system components try
to access the same memory address the data in the cache may become out of
date and thus needs updated (made coherent).

Supporting all this complexity requires logic and takes time and in doing so
this limits the speed that a conventional system can access memory, the more
processors there are in a system the more complex this problem becomes.
Cache design in conventional CPUs speeds up memory access but compromises
are made to get it to work.

APU local memory - no cache
To solve the complexity associated with cache design and to increase
performance the Cell designers took the radical approach of not including
any. Instead they used a series of local memories, there are 8 of these, 1
in each APU.

The APUs operate on registers which are read from or written to the local
memory. This local memory can access main memory in blocks of 1024 bits but
the APUs cannot act directly on main memory.

By not using a caching mechanism the designers have removed the need for a
lot of the complexity which goes along with a cache. The local memory can
only be accessed by the individual APU, there is no coherency mechanism
directly connected to the APU or local memory.

This may sound like an inflexible system which will be complex to program
and it most likely is but this system will deliver data to the APU registers
at a phenomenal rate. If 2 registers can be moved per cycle to or from the
local memory it will in it's first incarnation deliver 147 Gigabytes per
second. That's for a single APU, the aggregate bandwidth for all local
memories will be over a Terabyte per second - no CPU in the consumer market
has a cache which will even get close to that figure. The APUs need to be
fed with data and by using a local memory based design the Cell designers
have provided plenty of it.

Choerency
While there is not coherency mechanism in the APUs a mechanism does exist.
To prevent problems occurring when 2 APUs use the same memory, a mechanism
is used which involves some extra data stored in the RAM and an extra "busy"
bit in the local storage. There are quite a number of diagrams to look at
and a detailed explanation in the patent if you wish to read up on the exact
mechanism used. However the system is a much simpler system than trying to
keep caches up to date since it essentially just marks data as either
readable or not and lists which APU tried to get it.

The system can complicate memory access though and slow it down, the
additional data stored in RAM could be moved on chip to speed things up but
may not be worth the extra silicon and subsequent cost at this point in
time.

Little is know at this point about the PUs apart from being "Power
architecture" but being a conventional CPU design I think it's safe to
assume there will be perfectly normal cache and coherency mechanism used
within them (presumably modified for the memory subsystem).

APUs on their own being well fed with data will make for some highly potent
processors. But...

APUs can also be chained, that is they can be set up to process data in a
stream using multiple APUs in parallel. In this mode a Cell may approach
it's theoretical maximum processing speed of 250 GigaFlops. In part 2 I
shall look at this, the rest of the internals of the Cell and other aspects
of the architecture.



[2]





Cell Architecture Explained - Part 2: Again Inside The Cell

Stream Processing

A big difference in Cells from normal CPUs is the ability of the APUs in a
Cell to be chained together to act as a stream processor [Stream]. A stream
processor takes data and processes it in a series of steps. Each of these
steps can be performed by one or more APUs.

A Cell processor can be set-up to perform streaming operations in a sequence
with one or more APUs working on each step. In order to do stream processing
an APU reads data from an input into it's local memory, performs the
processing step then writes it to a pre-defined part of RAM, the second APU
then takes the data just written, processes it and writes to a second part
of RAM. This sequence can use many APUs and APUs can read or write different
blocks of RAM depending on the application. If the computing power is not
enough the APUs in other cells can also be used to form an even longer
chain.

Steam processing does not generally require large memory bandwidth but Cell
will have it anyway. According to the patent each Cell will have access to
64 Megabytes directly via 8 bank controllers. If the stream processing is
set up to use blocks of RAM in different banks, different APUs processing
the stream can be reading and writing simultaneously to the different
blocks.

So you think your PC is fast...
It is where multiple memory banks are being used and the APUs are working on
compute heavy streaming applications that the Cell will be working hardest.
It's in these applications that the Cell may get close to it's theoretical
maximum performance and perform over an order of magnitude more calculations
per second than any desktop processor currently available.

If over clocked sufficiently (over 3.0GHz) and using some very optimised
code (SSE assembly), 5 dual core Opterons directly connected via
HyperTransport should be able to achieve a similar level of performance in
stream processing - as a single Cell.

The PlayStation 3 is expected to have have 4 Cells.

General purpose desktop CPUs are not designed for high performance vector
processing. They all have vector units on board in the shape of SSE or
Altivec but this is integrated on board and has to share the CPUs resources.
The APUs are dedicated high speed vector processors and with their own
memory don't need to share anything other than the memory. Add to this the
fact there are 8 of them and you can see why their computational capacity is
so large.

Such a large performance difference may sound completely ludicrous but it's
not without precedent, in fact if you own a reasonably modern graphics card
your existing system is be capable of a lot more than you think:

"For example, the nVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, recently released, has been
observed to reach 40 GFlops in fragment processing. In comparison, the
theoretical peak performance of the Intel 3GHz Pentium4 using SSE
instructions is only 6GFlops." [GPU]

The 3D Graphics chips in computers have long been capable of very much
higher performance than general purpose CPUs. Previously they were
restricted to 3D graphics processing but since the addition of shaders
people have been using them for more general purpose tasks [GPGPU], this has
not been without some difficulties but Shader 4.0 parts are expected to be a
lot more general purpose than before.

Existing GPUs can provide massive processing power when programmed properly,
the difference is the Cell will be cheaper and several times faster.

Hard Real Time Processing

Some stream processing needs to be timed exactly and this has also been
considered in the design to allow "hard" real time data processing. An
"absolute timer" is used to ensure a processing operation falls within a
specified time limit. This is useful on it's own but also ensures
compatibility with faster next generation cells since the timer is
independent of the processing itself.

Hard real time processing is usually controlled by specialist operating
systems such as QNX which are specially designed for it. Cell's hardware
support for it means pretty much any OS will be able to support it to some
degree. This will however only to apply to tasks using the APUs so I don't
see QNX going away anytime soon.

The DMAC

The DMAC (Direct Memory Access Controller) is a very important part of the
Cell as it acts as a communications hub. The PU doesn't issue instructions
directly to the APUs but rather issues them to the DMAC and it takes the
appropriate actions, this makes sense as the actions usually involve loading
or saving data. This also removes the need for direct connections between
the PU and APUs.

As the DMAC handles all data going into or out of the Cell it needs to
communicate via a very high bandwidth bus system. The patent does not
specify the exact nature of this bus other than saying it can be either a
normal bus or it can be a packet switched network. The packet switched
network will take up more silicon but will also have higher bandwidth, I
expect they've gone with the latter since this bus will need to transfer 10s
of Gigabytes per second. What we do know from the patent is that this bus is
huge, the patent specifies it at a whopping 1024 bits wide.

At the time the patent was written it appears the architecture for the DMAC
had not been fully worked out so as well as two potential bus designs the
DMAC itself has different designs. Distributed and centralised architectures
for the DMAC are both mentioned.

It's clear to me that the DMAC is one of the most important parts of the
Cell design, it doesn't do processing itself but has to content with 10's of
Gigabytes of memory flowing through it at any one time to many different
destinations, if speculation is correct the PS3 will have 100GByte / second
memory interface, if this is spread over 4 Cells that means each DMAC will
need to handle at least 25 Gigabytes per second. It also has to handle the
memory protection scheme and be able to issue memory access orders as well
as handling communication between the PU and APUs, it needs to be not only
fast but will also be a highly complex piece of engineering.


Memory

As with everything else in the Cell architecture the memory system is
designed for raw speed, it will have both low latency and very high
bandwidth. As mentioned previously memory is accessed in blocks of 1024
bits. The reason for this is not mentioned in the patent but I have a
theory:

While this may reduce flexibility it also decreases memory access latency -
the singles biggest factor currently holding back computers today. The
reason it's faster is the finer the address resolution the more complex the
logic and the longer it takes to look it up. The actual looking up may be
insignificant on the memory chip but each look-up requires a look-up
transaction which involves sending an address from the bank controller to
the memory device and this will take time. This time is significant itself
as there is one per memory access but what's worse is that every bit of
address resolution doubles the number of look-ups required.

If you have 512MB in your PC your RAM look-up resolution is 29 bits*,
however the system will read a minimum of 64 bits at a time so resolution is
26 bits. The PC will probably read more than this so you can probably really
say 23 bits.

* Note: I'm not counting I/O or graphics address space which will require an
extra bit or two.

In the Cell design there are 8 banks of 8MB each and if the minimum read is
1024 bits the resolution is 13 bits. An additional 3 bits are used to select
the bank but this is done on-chip so will have little impact. Each bit
doubles the number of memory look-ups so the PC will be doing a thousand
times more memory look-ups per second than the Cell does. The Cell's memory
busses will have more time free to transfer data and thus will work closer
to their maximum theoretical transfer rate. I'm not sure my theory is
correct but CPU caches use a similar trick.

What is not theoretical is the fact the Cell will use very high speed memory
connections - Sony and Toshiba licensed 3.2GHz memory technology from Rambus
in 2003 [Rambus]. If each cell has total bandwidth of 25.6 Gigabytes per
second each bank transfers data at 3.2 Gigabytes per second. Even given this
the buses are not large (64 data pins for all 8), this is important as it
keeps chip manufacturing costs down.

100 Gigabytes per second sounds huge until you consider top end graphics
cards are in the region of 50 Gigabytes per second already, doubling over a
couple of years sounds fairly reasonable. But these are just the theoretical
figures and never get reached, assuming the system I described above is used
the bandwidth on the Cell should be much closer to it's theoretical figure
than competing systems and thus will perform better.

APUs may need to access memory from different Cells especially if a long
stream is set up, thus the Cells include a high speed interconnect. Details
of this are not known other than the individual wires will work at 6.4 GHz.
I expect there will be busses of these between each Cell to facilitate the
high speed transfer of data to each other. This technology sounds not
entirely unlike HyperTransport though the implementation may be very
different.

In addition to this a switching system has been devised so if more then 4
Cells are present they too can have fast access to memory. This system may
be used in Cell based workstations. It's not clear how more than 8 cells
will communicate but I imagine the system could be extended to handle more.
IBM have announced a single rack based workstation will be capable of up to
16 TeraFlops, they'll need 64 Cells for this sort of performance so they
have obviously found some way of connecting them.

Memory Protection
The memory system also has a memory protection scheme implemented in the
DMAC. Memory is divided into "sandboxes" and a mask used to determine which
APU or APUs can access it. This checking is performed in the DMAC before any
access is performed, if an APU attempts to read or write the wrong sandbox
the memory access is forbidden.

Existing CPUs include hardware memory protection system but it is a lot more
complex than this. They use page tables which indicate the use of blocks of
RAM and also indicate if the data is in RAM or on disc, these tables can
become large and don't fit on the CPU all at once, this means in order to
read a memory location the CPU may first have to read a page table from
memory and read data in from disc - all before the data required is read.

In the Cell the APU can either issue a memory access or not, the table is
held in a special SRAM in the DMAC and is never flushed. This system may
lack flexibility but is very simple and consistently very fast.

Software Cells

Software cells are containers which hold data and programs called apulets as
well as other data and instructions required to get the apulet running
(memory required, number of APUs used etc.). The cell contains source,
destination and reply address fields, the nature of these depends on the
network in use so software Cells can be sent around to different hardware
Cells. There are also network independent addresses which will define the
specific Cell exactly. This allows you to say, send a software Cell to
hardware Cell in a specific computer on a network.

The APUs use virtual addresses but these are mapped to a real address as
soon as DMA commands are issued. The software Cell contains these DMA
commands which retrieve data from memory to process, if APUs are set up to
process streams the Cell will contain commands which describe where to read
data from and where to write results to. Once set up, the APUs are "kicked"
into action.

It's not clear how this system will operate in practice but it would appear
to include some adaptively so as to allow Cells to appear and disappear on a
network.

This system is in effect a basic Operating System but could be implemented
as a layer within an existing OS. There's no reason to believe Cell will
have any limitations regarding which Operating Systems can run.

Multi-Cell'd animals

One of the main points of the entire Cell architecture is parallel
processing. Software cells can be sent pretty much anywhere and don't depend
on a specific transport means. The ability of software Cells to run on
hardware Cells determined at runtime is a key feature of the Cell
architecture. Want more computing power? Plug in a few more Cells and there
you are.

If you have a bunch of cells sitting around talking to each other via WiFi
connections the system can use it to distribute software cells for
processing. The system was not designed to act like a big iron machine, that
is, it is not arranged around a single shared or closely coupled set of
memories. All the memory may be addressable but each Cell has it's own
memory and they'll work most efficiently in their own memory or at least in
small groups of Cells where fast inter-links allow the memory to be shared.

Going above this number of Cells isn't described in detail but the mechanism
present in the software Cells to make use of whatever networking technology
is in use allows ad-hoc arrangements of Cells to be made without having to
worry about rewriting software to take account of different network types.

The parallel processing system essentially moves a lot of complexity which
would normally be handled by hardware and moves it into software. This
usually slows things down but the benefit is flexibility, you give the
system a set of software Cells to compute and it figures out how to
distribute them itself. If your system changes (Cells added or removed) the
OS should take care of this without user or programmer intervention.

Writing software for parallel processing is usually highly difficult and
this essentially gets around the problem. The programmer will specify which
tasks need to be done and the relationship between them and the Cell's OS
and compiler will take care of the rest.

In the future, instead of having multiple discrete computers you'll have
multiple computers acting as a single system. Upgrading will not mean
replacing an old system anymore, it'll mean enhancing it. What's more your
"computer" may in reality also include your PDA, TV and Camcorder all
co-operating and acting as one.


Concrete Processing

The Cell architecture goes against the grain in many areas but in one area
it has gone in the complete opposite direction to the rest of the technology
industry. Operating systems started as a rudimentary way for programs to
talk to hardware without developers having the to write their own drivers
every time. As time went on operating systems have evolved and taking on a
wide variety of complex tasks, one way it has done this is by abstracting
more and more away from the hardware.

Object oriented programming goes further and abstracts individual parts of
programs away from each other. This has evolved into Java like technologies
which provide their own environment thus abstracting the application away
from the individual operating system. Web technologies do the same thing,
the platform which is serving you with this page is completely irrelevant,
as is the platform viewing it. When writing this I did not have to make a
Windows or Mac specific version of the HTML, the underlying hardware, OSs
and web browsers are completely abstracted away.

Even hardware manufacturers have taken to abstraction, the Transmeta line of
CPUs are sold as x86 CPUs but in reality they are not. They provide an
abstraction in software which hides the inner details of the CPU which is
not only not x86 but a completely different architecture. This is not unique
to Transmeta or even x86, the internal architecture of most modern CPUs is
very different from their programming model.

If there is a law in computing, Abstraction is it, it is an essential piece
of today's computing technology, much of what we do would not be possible
without it. Cell however, has abandoned it. The programming model for the
Cell will be concrete, when you program an APU you will be programming what
is in the APU itself, not some abstraction. You will be "hitting the
hardware" so to speak.

While this may sound like sacrilege and there are reasons why it is a bad
idea in general there is one big advantage: Performance. Every abstraction
layer you add adds computaions and not by some small measure, an abstraction
can decrease performance by a factor of ten fold. Consider that in any
modern system there are multiple abstraction layers on top of one another
and you'll begin to see why a 50MHz 486 may of seemed fast years ago but
runs like a dog these days, you need a more modern processor to deal with
the subsequently added abstractions.

The big disadvantage of removing abstractions is it will significantly add
complexity for the developer and it limits how much the hardware designers
can change the system. The latter has always been important and is
essentially THE reason for abstraction but if you've noticed modern
processors haven't really changed much in years. The Cell designers
obviously don't expect their architecture to change significantly so have
chosen to set it in stone from the beginning. That said there is some
flexibility in the system so it can change at least partially.

The Cell approach does give some of the benefits of abstraction though. Java
has achieved cross platform compatibility by abstracting the OS and hardware
away, it provides a "virtual machine" which is the same across all
platforms, the underlying hardware and OS can change but the virtual machine
does not.

Cell provides something similar to Java but in a completely different way.
Java provides a software based "virtual machine" which is the same on all
platforms, Cell provides a machine as well - but they do it in hardware, the
equivalent of Java's virtual machine is the Cells physical hardware. If I
was to write Cell code on OS X the exact same Cell code would run on
Windows, Linux or Zeta because in all cases it is the hardware Cells which
execute it.


DRM In The Hardware

Some will no doubt be turned off by the fact that DRM is built into the Cell
hardware. Sony is a media company and like the rest of the industry that arm
of the company are no doubt pushing for DRM type solutions. It must also be
noted that the Cell is destined for HDTV and BluRay / HD-DVD systems, any
high definition recorded content is going to be very strictly controlled by
DRM so Sony have to add this capability otherwise they would be effectively
locking themselves out of a large chunk of their target market. Hardware DRM
is no magic bullet however, hardware systems have been broken before -
including Set Top Boxes and even IBM's crypto hardware for their mainframes.


Other Options And The Future

There are plans for future technology in the Cell architecture, optical
interconnects appear to be planned, it's doubtful that this will appear in
PS3 but clearly the designers are planning for the day when copper wires hit
their limit (thought to be around 10GHz) Other materials than Silicon also
appear to be being considered for fabrication but this will be an even
bigger undertaking.

The design of Cells is not entirely set in stone, there can be variable
numbers of APUs and the APUs themselves can include more floating point or
integer calculation units. In some cases APUs can be removed and other
things such as I/O units or graphics processor placed in their place. Nvidia
are proving the graphics hardware for the PS3 so this may be done within a
modified Cell at some point.

As Moore's law moves forward and we get yet more transistors per chip I've
no doubt the designers will take advantage of this. The idea of having 4
Cells per chip is mentioned in the patent but there are other options also
for different applications of the Cell.

When multiple APUs are operating on streaming data it appears they write to
RAM and read back again, it would be perfectly feasible however to add
buffers to allow direct APU to APU writes. Direct transfers are mentioned in
the patent but nothing much is said about them.


To Finish Up

The Cell architecture is essentially a general purpose PowerPC CPU with a
set of 8 very high performance vector processors and a fast memory and I / O
system, this is coupled with a very clever task distribution system which
allows ad-hoc clusters to be set up.

What is not immediately apparent is the aggressiveness of the design. The
lack of cache and runtime virtual memory system is highly unusual and has
not done on any modern general purpose CPU in the last 20 years. It can only
be compared with the sorts of designs Seymour Cray produced. The Cell is not
only going to be very fast, but because of the highly aggressive design the
rest of the industry is going to have a very hard time catching up with it*.

To sum up there's really only one way of saying it:

This system isn't just going to rock, it's going to play German heavy metal.



[3]



Cell Architecture Explained - Part 3: Cellular Computing

The Cell is not a fancy graphics chip, it is intended for general purpose
computing. As if to confirm this the graphics hardware in the PlayStation 3
is being provided by Nvidia [Nvidia]. The APUs are not truly general purpose
like normal microprocessors but the Cell makes up for this by virtue of
including a PU which is a normal PowerPC microprocessor.


Cell Applications

As I said in part 1, the Cell is destined for uses other than just the
PlayStation 3. But what sort of applications Cell will be good for?

Cell will not work well for everything, some applications cannot be
vectorised at all, for others the system of reading memory blocks could
potentially cripple performance. In cases like these I expect the PU will be
used but that's not entirely clear as the patent seems to assume the PU can
only be used by the OS.


Games

Games are an obvious target, the Cell was designed for a games console so if
they don't work well there's something wrong! The Cell designers have
concentrated on raw computing power and not on graphics, as such we will see
hardware functions moved into software and much more flexibility being
available to developers. Will the PS3 be the first console to get real-time
ray traced games?


3D Graphics

Again this is a field the Cell was largely designed for so expect it to do
well here, Graphics is an "embarrassingly parallel", vectorisable and
streamable problem so all the APUs will be in full use, the more Cells you
use the faster the graphics will be. There is a lot of research into
different advanced graphics techniques these days and I expect Cells will be
used heavily for these and enable these techniques to make their way into
the mainstream. If you think graphics are good already you're in for
something of a surprise.


Video

Image manipulations can be vectorised and this can be shown to great effect
in Photoshop. Video processing can similarly be accelerated and Apple will
be using the capabilities of existing GPUs (Graphics Processor Units) to
accelerate video processing in "core image", Cell will almost certainly be
able to accelerate anything GPUs can handle.

Video encoding and decoding can also be vectorised so expect format
conversions and mastering operations to benefit greatly from a Cell. I
expect Cells will turn up in a lot of professional video hardware.


Audio

Audio is one of those areas where you can never have enough power. Today's
electronic musicians have multiple virtual synthesisers each of which has
multiple voices. Then there's traditionally synthesised, sampled and real
instruments. All of these need to be handled and have their own processing
needs, that's before you put different effects on each channel. Then you may
want global effects and compression per channel and final mixing. Many of
these processes can be vectorised. Cell will be an absolute dream for
musicians and yet another headache for synthesiser manufacturers who have
already seen PCs encroaching on their territory.


DSP (Digital Signal Processing)

The primary algorithm used in DSP is the FFT (Fast Fourier transform) which
breaks a signal up into individual frequencies for further processing. The
FFT is a highly vectorisable algorithm and is used so much that many vector
units and microprocessors contains instructions especially for accelerating
this algorithm.

There are thousands of different DSP applications and most of them can be
streamed so Cell can be used for many of these applications. Once prices
have dropped and power consumption has come down expect the Cell to be used
in all manner for different consumer and industrial devices.

SETI

A perfect example of a DSP application, again based on FFTs, a Cell will
boost my SETI@home [SETI] score no end! As mentioned elsewhere I estimate a
single Cell will complete unit in under 5 minutes [SETI Calc]. Numerous
other distributed applications will also benefit from the Cell.


Scientific

For conventional (non vectorisable) applications this system will be at
least as fast as 4 PowerPC 970s with a fast memory interface. For
vectorisable algorithms performance will go onto another planet. A potential
problem however will be the relatively limited memory capability (this may
be PlayStation 3 only, the Cell may be able to address larger memories). It
is possible that even a memory limited Cell could be used perfectly well by
streaming data into and out of the I/O unit.

GPUs are already used for scientific computation and Cell will be likely be
useable in the same areas: "Many kinds of computations can be accelerated on
GPUs including sparse linear system solvers, physical simulation, linear
algebra operations, partial difference equations, fast Fourier transform,
level-set computation, computational geometry problems, and also
non-traditional graphics, such as volume rendering, ray-tracing, and flow
visualization."[GPU]


Super Computing

Many modern supercomputers use clusters of commodity PCs because they are
cheap and powerful. You currently need in the region of 250 PCs to even get
onto the top 500 supercomputer list [Top500]. It should take just 8 Cells to
get onto the list and 560 to take the lead*. This is one area where
backwards compatibility is completely unimportant and will be one of the
first areas to fall, expect Cell based machines to rapidly take over the Top
500 list from PC based clusters.

There are other super computing applications which require large amounts of
interprocess communication and do not run well in clusters. The Top500 list
does not measure these separately but this is an area where big iron systems
do well and Cray rules, PC clusters don't even get a look-in. The Cells have
high speed communication links and this makes them ideal for such systems
although additional engineering will be required for large numbers of Cells.
Cells may not only take over from PC clusters but also expect them to do
well here also.

If the Cell has a 64 bit Multiply-add instruction (I'd be very surprised if
this wasn't present) it'll take 8000 of them to get a PetaFlop*. That record
will be very difficult to beat.

* Based on theoretical values, in reality you'd need more Cells depending on
the efficiency.


Servers

This is one area which does not strike me as being terribly vectorisable,
indeed XML and similar processing are unlikely to be helped by the APUs at
all though the memory architecture may help (which is unusual given how
amazingly inefficient XML is). However servers generally do a lot of work in
their database backend.

Commercial databases with real life data sets have been studied and found to
have been benefited from running on GPUs. You can also expect these to be
accelerated by Cells. So yes, even servers can benefit from Cells.


Stream Processing Applications

A big difference from normal CPUs is the ability of the APUs in a cell to be
chained together to act as a stream processor [Stream]. A stream processor
takes a flow of data and processes it in a series of steps. Each of these
steps can be performed by a different APU or even different APUs on
different Cells.

An Example: A Digital TV Receiver
To give an example of stream processing take a Set Top Box for watching
Digital TV, this is a lot more complex process than just playing a MPEG
movie as a whole host of additional processes are involved. This is what
needs to be done before you can watch the latest episode of Star Trek,
here's an outline of the processes involved:

  a.. COFDM demodulation
  b.. Error correction
  c.. Demultiplexing
  d.. De-scrambling
  e.. MPEG video decode
  f.. MPEG audio decode
  g.. Video scaling
  h.. Display construction
  i.. Contrast & Brightness processing
These tasks are typically performed using a combination of custom hardware
and dedicated DSPs. They can be done in software but it'll take a very
powerful CPU if not several of them to do all the processing - and that's
just for standard definition MPEG2. HDTV with H.264 will require
considerably more processing power. General purpose CPUs tend not to be very
efficient so it is generally easier and cheaper to use custom chips,
although highly expensive to develop they are cheap when produced in high
volumes and consume miniscule amounts of power.

These tasks are vectorisable and working in a sequence are of course
streamable. A Cell processor could be set-up to perform these operations in
a sequence with one or more APUs working on each step, this means there is
no need for custom chip development and new standards can be supported in
software. The power of a Cell is such that it is likely that a single Cell
will be capable of doing all the processing necessary, even for High
definition standards. Toshiba intend on using the Cell for HDTVs.

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell_Stream.gif

 Non Accelerated Applications

There are going to be many applications which cannot be accelerated by a
Cell processor and even those which can may not be ported overnight. I don't
for instance expect Cell will even attempt to go after the server market.

But generally PCs either don't need much power or they can be accelerated by
the Cell, Intel and AMD will be churning out ever more multi-core'd x86s but
what's going to happen if Cells will deliver vastly more power at what will
rapidly become a lower price?

The PC is about to have the biggest fight it has ever had. To date it has
won with ease every time, this time it will not be so easy. In Part 4 I look
at this forthcoming battle royale.



[4]





The Cell Processor Explained, Part 4: Cell V's the PC

To date the PC has defeated everything in it's path [PCShare]. No
competitor, no matter how good has even got close to replacing it. If the
Cell is placed into desktop computers it may be another victim of the PC.
However, I think for a number of reasons that the Cell is not only the
biggest threat the PC has ever faced, but also one which might actually have
the capacity to defeat it.


The Sincerest Form of Flattery is Theft

20 years ago an engineer called Jay Miner who had been working on video
games (he designed the Atari 2600 chip) decided to do something better and
produce a desktop computer which combined a video game chipset with a
workstation CPU. The prototype was called Lorraine and it was eventually
released to the market as the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga had hardware
accelerated high colour screens, a GUI based multitasking OS, multiple
sampled sound channels and a fast 32 bit CPU. At the time PCs had screens
displaying text, a speaker which beeped and they ran MSDOS on a 16 bit CPU.
The Amiga went on to sell in millions but the manufacturer went bankrupt in
1994.

Like many other platforms which were patently superior to it, the Amiga was
swept aside by the PC.

The PC has seen off every competitor that has crossed paths with it, no
matter how good the OS or hardware. The Amiga in 1985 was years ahead of the
PC, it took more than 5 years for the PC to catch up with the hardware and
10 years to catch up with the OS. Yet the PC still won, as it did against
every other platform. The PC has been able to do this because of a huge
software base and it's ability to steal the competitors clothes, low prices
and high performance were not a factor until much later. If you read the
description of the Amiga I gave again you'll find it also describes a modern
PC. The Amiga may have introduced specialised chips for graphics
acceleration and multitasking to the desktop world but now all computers
have them.

In the case of the Amiga it was not the hardware or the price which beat it.
It was the vast MSDOS software base which prevented it getting into the
business market, Commodore's ability to shoot themselves in the foot
finished finished them off. NeXT came along next with even better hardware
and an even better Unix based OS but they couldn't dent the PC either. It
was next to be dispatched and again the PC later caught up and stole all
it's best features, it took 13 years to bring memory protection to the
consumer level PC.

The PC can and does take on the best features of competitors, history has
shown that even if this takes a very long time the PC still ultimately wins.
Could the PC not just steal the Cell's unique attributes and cast it aside
also?

Cell V's x86

This looks like a battle no one can win. x86 has won all of it's battles
because when Intel and AMD pushed the x86 architecture they managed to
produce very high performance processors and in their volumes they could
sell them for low prices. When x86 came up against faster RISC competitors
it was able to use the very same RISC technologies to close the speed gap to
the point where there was no significant advantage going with RISC.

Three of what were once important RISC families have also been dispatched to
the great Fab in the sky. Even Intel's own Itanium has been beaten out of
the low / mid server space by the Opteron. Sun have been burned as well,
they cancelled the next in the UltraSPARC line, bought in radical new
designs and now sell the Opteron which threatened to eclipse their low end.
Only POWER seems to be holding it's own but that's because IBM has the
resources to pour into it to keep it competitive and it's in the high end
market which x86 has never managed to penetrate and may not scale to.

To Intel and AMD's processors Cell presents a completely different kind of
competition to what has gone before. The speed difference is so great that
nothing short of a complete overhaul of the x86 architecture will be able to
bring it even close performance wise. Changes are not unheard of in x86 land
but neither Intel or AMD appear to be planning a change even nearly radical
enough to catch up. That said Intel recently gained access to many of
Nvidia's patents [Intel+Nvidia] and are talking about having dozens of cores
per chip so who knows what Santa Clara are brewing. [Project Z]

Multicore processors are coming to the x86 world soon from both Intel and
AMD [MultiCore], but high speed x86 CPUs typically have high power
requirements. In order to have 2 Opterons on a single core AMD have had to
reduce their clock rate in order to keep them from requiring over a hundred
watts, Intel are doing the same for the Pentium 4. The Pentium-M however is
a (mostly) high performance low power part and this will go into multi-core
devices much easier than the P4, expect to see chips with 2 cores arriving
followed by 4 & 8 core designs over the next few years.

Cell will accelerate many commonly used applications by ludicrous
proportions compared to PCs. Intel could put 10 cores on a chip and they'll
match neither it's performance or price. The APUs are dedicated vector
processors, x86 are not. The x86 cores will no doubt include the SSE vector
units but these are no match for even a single APU.

Then there's the parallel nature of Cell. If you want more computing power
simply add another Cell, the OS will take care of distributing the software
Cells to the second or third etc processor. Try that on a PC, yes many OSs
will support multiple processors but many applications do not and will need
to be modified accordingly - a process which will take many, many years.
Cell applications will be written to be scalable from the very beginning as
that's how the system works.

Cell may be vastly more powerful than existing x86 processors but history
has shown the PC's ability to overcome even vastly better systems. Being
faster alone is not enough to topple the PC.

Cell V's Software

The main problem with competing with the PC is not the CPU, it's the
software. A new CPU no matter how powerful, is no use without software. The
PC has always won because it's always had plenty of software and this has
allowed it to see off it's competitors no matter how powerful they were or
the advantages they had at the time. The market for high performance systems
is very limited, it's the low end systems which sell.

Cell has the power and it will be cheap. But can it challenge the PC without
software? The answer to this question would have been simple once, but PC
market has changed over time and for a number of reasons Cell is now a
threat:

The first reason is Linux. Linux has shown that alternative operating
systems can break into the PC software market against Windows, the big
difference with Linux though is that it is cross platform. If the software
you need runs on linux, switching hardware platforms is no problem as much
of the software will still run on different CPUs.

The second reason is cost, other platforms have often used expensive custom
components and have been made in smaller numbers. This has put their cost
above that of PCs, putting them at immediate disadvantage. Cell may be
expensive initially but once Sony and Toshiba's fabs ramp up it will be
manufactured in massive volumes forcing the prices down, the fact it's going
into the PS3 and TVs is an obvious help for getting the massive volumes that
will be required. IBM will also be making Cells and many companies use IBM's
silicon process technologies, if truly vast numbers of Cells were required
Samsung, Chartered, Infineon and even AMD could manufacture them (provided
they had a license of course).

The third reason is power, the vast majority of PCs these don't need the
power they provide, Cell will only accentuate this because it will be able
to off load most of the intensive stuff to the APUs. What this means is that
if you do need to run a specific piece of software you can emulate it. This
would have been impossibly slow once but most PC CPUs are already more than
enough and with today's advanced JIT based emulators you might not even
notice the difference.

The reason many high end PCs are purchased is to accelerate many of the very
tasks the Cell will accelerate. You'll also find these power users are more
interested in the tools and not the platform, apart from Games these are not
areas over which Microsoft has any hold. Given the sheer amount of
acceleration a Cell (or set of Cells) can deliver I can see many power users
being happy to jump platforms if the software they want is ported or can be
emulated.

Cell is going to be cheap, powerful, run many of the same operating systems
and if all else fails it can emulate a PC will little noticeable difference,
software and price will not be a problem. Availability will also not be a
problem, you can buy playstations anywhere. This time round the traditional
advantages the PC has held over other systems will not be present, they will
have no advantage in performance, software or price. That is not to say that
the Cell will walk in and just take over, it's not that simple.

Attack

IBM plan on selling workstations based on the Cell but I don't expect
they'll be cheap or sold in any numbers to anyone other than PlayStation
developers.

Cell will not just appear in exotic workstations and PlayStations though, I
also expect they'll turn up in desktop computers of one kind or another
(i.e. I know Genesi are considering doing one). When they do they're going
to turn the PC business upside down.

Even with a single Cell it will outgun top end multiprocessor PCs many times
over. That's gotta hurt, and it will hurt, Cell is going to effectively make
general purpose microprocessors obsolete.

Infection inside
Of course this wont happen overnight and there's nothing to stop PC makers
from including a Cell processor on a PCI / PCIe card or even on the
motherboard. Microsoft may be less than interested in supporting a
competitor but that doesn't mean drivers couldn't be written and support
added by the STI partners. Once this is done developers will be able to make
use of the Cell in PC applications and this is where it'll get very
interesting. With computationally intensive processing moved to the Cell
there will be no need for a PC to include a fast x86, a low cost slow one
will do just fine.

Some companies however will want to cut costs further and there's a way to
do that. The Cell includes at least a PowerPC 970 grade CPU so it'll be a
reasonably fast processor. Since there is no need for a fast x86 processor
why not just emulate one? Removing the x86 and support chips from a PC will
give big cost savings. An x86 computer without an x86 sounds a bit weird but
that's never stopped Transmeta who do exactly that, perhaps Transmeta could
even provide the x86 emulation technology, they're already thinking of
getting out of chip manufacturing [Transmeta].

Cell is a very, very powerful processor. It's also going to become cheap. I
fully expect it'll be quite possible to (eventually) build a low cost PC
based around a Cell and sell it for a few hundred dollars. If all goes well
will Dell sell Cells?

Game on
You could argue gamers will still drive PC performance up but Sony could
always pull a fast one and produce a PS3 on a card for the PC. Since it
would not depend on the PC's computational or memory resources it's
irrelevant how weak or strong they are. Sony could produce a card which
turns even the lowest performance PC into a high end gaming machine, If such
a product sold in large numbers studios developing for PS3 already may
decide they not need to develop a separate version for the PC, the resulting
effect on the PC games market could be catastrophic.

While you could use an emulated OS it's always preferable to have a native
OS. There's always Linux However Linux isn't really a consumer OS and seems
to be having something of a struggle becoming one. There is however another
very much consumer ready OS which already runs on a "Power Architecture"
CPU: OS X.

Cell V's Apple

The Cell could be Apple's nemesis or their saviour, they are the obvious
candidate company to use the Cell. It's perfect for them as it will
accelerate all the applications their primary customer base uses and
whatever core it uses the the PU will be PowerPC compatible. Cells will not
accelerate everything so they could use them as co-processors in their own
machines beside a standard G5 / G6 [G6] getting the best of both worlds.

The Core Image technology due to appear in OS X "Tiger" already uses GPUs
(Graphics Processor Units) for things other than 3D computations and this
same technology could be retargeted at the Cell's APUs. Perhaps that's why
it was there in the first place...

If other companies use Cell to produce computers there is no obvious
consumer OS to use, with OS X Apple have - for the second time - the chance
to become the new Microsoft. Will they take it? If an industry springs up of
Cell based computers not doing so could be very dangerous. When the OS and
CPU is different between the Mac an PC there is (well, was) a big gap
between systems to jump and a price differential can be justified. If
there's a sizeable number of low cost machines capable of running OS X the
price differential may prove too much, I doubt even that would be a knockout
blow for Apple but it would certainly be bad news (even the PC hasn't
managed a knockout).

PC manufacturers don't really care which components they use or OS they run,
they just want to sell PCs. If Apple was to "think different" on OS X
licensing and get hardware manufacturers using Cells perhaps they could turn
Microsoft's clone army against their masters. I'm sure many companies would
be only too happy to get released from Microsoft's iron grip. This is
especially so if Apple was to undercut them, which they could do easily
given the 400% + margins Microsoft makes on their OS.


Licensing OS X wouldn't necessarily destroy Apple's hardware business,
there'll always be a market for cooler high end systems [Alien]. Apple also
now has a substantial software base and part of this could be used to give
added value to their hardware in a similar manner to that done today.
Everyone else would just have to pay for it as usual.

In "The Future of Computing" [Future] I argued that the PC industry would
come under threat from low cost computers from the far east. The basis of
the argument was that in the PC industry Microsoft and Intel both enjoy very
large margins. I argued that it's perfectly feasible to make a low cost
computer which is "fast enough" for most peoples needs and running Linux
there would be no Microsoft Tax, provided the system could do what most
people need to do it could be made and sold at a sufficiently low price that
it will attack the market from below.

A Cell based system running OS X could be nearly as cheap (depending on the
price Apple want to charge for OS X) but with Cell's sheer power it will
exceed the power of even the most powerful PCs. This system could sell like
hot cakes and if it's sufficiently low cost it could be used to sell into
the low cost markets which PC makers are now beginning to exploit. There is
a huge opportunity for Apple here, I think they'll be stark raving mad not
to take it - because if they don't someone else will - Microsoft already
have PowerPC experience with the Xbox2 OS...

Cell will has a performance advantage over the PC and will be able to use
the PC's advantages as well. With Apple's help it could also run what is
arguably the best OS on the market today, at a low price point. The new Mac
mini already looks like it's going to sell like hot cakes, imagine what it
could do equipped with a Cell...

It looks like the PC could finally have a competitor to take it on, but the
PC still has a way of fighting back, PC's are already considerably more
powerful than you might think...

The PC Retaliates: Cell V's GPU

The PC does have a weapon with which to respond, the GPU (Graphics Processor
Unit). On computational power GPUs will be the only real competitors to the
Cell.

GPUs have always been massively more powerful than general purpose
processors [PC + GPU][GPU] but since programmable shaders were introduced
this power has b
The 2005 ISSCC

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