IBM opens up Cell architecture

outsideroutsider
Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
EETimes (being /. at the moment)



If Apple announces Cell support for future Macs at WWDC, this would give sufficient opportunity for the big developers to start migrating their projects to utilize Cell. Will this extend to licensing Cell technology to other shops, like Intel?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,423member
    Good news!



    Darwin running on Cell!
  • Reply 2 of 3
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,423member
    Smorgasbord of Cell info. Presentation



    I want it even more now. I lust for cell :P
  • Reply 3 of 3
    thttht Posts: 5,443member
    The Sony presentation doesn't give much new technical information about the chip at all. Lots of software related stuff though.



    One of the new, perhaps only, things is the SPE can do 2-way double precision SIMD FPU ops. That's new to me. Not much else. Also, the SPE does "DP FMAC has 14 cycle and 7 cycle issue rate."



    I'm guessing this means that SPE DP FPU isn't pipelined, that a 1-way DP FMAC op takes 7 cycles to execute, that 2-way DP FMAC op take 14 cycles to execute, and that the SPE can only issue a DP FMAC every 7 or 14 cycles. This isn't new though, since we already knew it took a huge hit for DP.



    It looks like PPE description confirms the 1 integer unit, 1 FPU and 1 VMX unit we've been speculating.
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