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Eug · Nov 24, 2009, 11:23 AM

End of the line for IBM's Cell

I guess nobody except Sony and IBM's HPC division cared.

analogue SPRINKLES · Nov 24, 2009, 12:18 PM

Did Toshiba use it too?

Anywho, doesn't matter. It works in the PS3 and that's all it ever really needed to do anyway.

Not like the PPC chip in the Xbox has much of a future nor does the hamster in a wheel in the Wii either.

The Final Dakar · Nov 24, 2009, 12:22 PM

It matters in as much as it was billed as the second coming of christ for a time.

exca1ibur · Nov 24, 2009, 12:35 PM

IBM: We'll Keep Making Cell Processors As Long As Sony Needs Them

- So don't worry about Sony running out of chips anytime soon. IBM has them covered. As for the fate of the Cell processor technology? Well that will live on as well says Turek, as "the core technology of the Cell processor will continue to proliferate throughout the IBM product line." -

OreoCookie · Nov 24, 2009, 12:50 PM

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES

Did Toshiba use it too?

Yes, they've put them in a few notebooks, but I don't think this has had much of an impact.

Regarding other IBM cpus, there is plenty in IBM's oven: they're planning successors to their PowerPC 440/450 embedded cpus whose derivatives are used in their super computers. I can imagine that they put not just two or four, but a bunch of them onto a single die. The PowerPC A2 will include AltiVec, for instance.

analogue SPRINKLES · Nov 24, 2009, 12:59 PM

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar

It matters in as much as it was billed as the second coming of christ for a time.

By who? The internet?

jokell82 · Nov 24, 2009, 01:05 PM

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES

By who? The internet?

Mac users (who didn't know what they were talking about) before the Intel switch, which included most of the rumor sites.

The Final Dakar · Nov 24, 2009, 01:07 PM

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES

By who? The internet?

Whoever it was that was talking **** about it being in your toasters and tvs to become part of some kind of super processor.

analogue SPRINKLES · Nov 24, 2009, 01:23 PM

Originally Posted by jokell82

Mac users (who didn't know what they were talking about) before the Intel switch, which included most of the rumor sites.

Well God knows what they were thinking, I mean I remember Eug holding out for about 3 years thinking that a G5 laptop was right around the corner when the heatsink in the G5 towers were about 10 pounds on their own. I don't think too many mac users thought this cell would be in Macs though.

From the start everyone said it was hard to program for and used a lot of power so who knows what the fanboys were thinking.

Big Mac · Nov 24, 2009, 08:17 PM

Sucks.

mduell · Nov 24, 2009, 09:31 PM

Yea it turns out the world isn't too thrilled about single precision arithmetic.

Big Mac · Nov 24, 2009, 09:37 PM

I can tell, though, that the PPC is preparing for a comeback.

CharlesS · Nov 24, 2009, 11:07 PM

Just like the Roman Empire.

Any day now...

The Godfather · Nov 24, 2009, 11:14 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Just like the Roman Empire.

Any day now...

You mean Hitler's Germany?

CharlesS · Nov 24, 2009, 11:15 PM

No, that was quite a different animal. And it fell apart fairly quickly after it came into existence too, so I don't think it would be a great example either way.

Although I do have to say I'm impressed — I really didn't expect Godwin's Law to pop up in this thread. Nice job.

The Godfather · Nov 24, 2009, 11:17 PM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

I can tell, though, that the PPC is preparing for a comeback.

PPC's best chance is Linux for embedded applications (apparently it has a big following in Australia and Israel). And even in that area, it is overshadowed by ARM.

I'd like to be surprised by a product by the PPC team from former PA Semi, now that it joined our fruit company.

Hawkeye_a · Nov 27, 2009, 11:12 PM

The geek in me is kinda disappointed cause of the scalability that was promised with the Cell platform..... wasted R&D imo. I thought in time the Cell would become the successor to the PPC., and might even make it into workstations.

downinflames68 · Nov 28, 2009, 12:28 AM

That sucks. CELL had a bright future.

Eug · Nov 28, 2009, 12:41 AM

Originally Posted by downinflames68

CELL had a bright future.

Yeah, I guess that's why they're killing it off.

The Godfather · Nov 28, 2009, 02:59 PM

Should've been licensable by other manufacturers like the ARM company does for its ARM architecture. In fact, it may not be too late yet to grab a sizable share of personal computing applications. Give it a couple of years and ARM performance will be on par with PPC, it will be a no-brainer for embedded applications, with its diverse and feature-full chips available from different manufacturers.

downinflames68 · Nov 30, 2009, 03:56 AM

Sony still subsidizing US military supercomputer efforts

OreoCookie · Nov 30, 2009, 04:55 AM

Originally Posted by The Godfather

Should've been licensable by other manufacturers like the ARM company does for its ARM architecture. In fact, it may not be too late yet to grab a sizable share of personal computing applications. Give it a couple of years and ARM performance will be on par with PPC, it will be a no-brainer for embedded applications, with its diverse and feature-full chips available from different manufacturers.

ARM is the market leader in the embedded market by a very wide margin and ARM cores could easily be used for supercomputers already. IBMs fastest super computers rely on a rather old PowerPC core specialized for embedded applications, the PowerPC 440 and 450. As a matter of fact, you can find these in quite a few printers, my Kyocera printer uses a 266 MHz PowerPC 405 cpu.

Eug · Nov 30, 2009, 09:46 AM

Originally Posted by downinflames68

Sony still subsidizing US military supercomputer efforts

Air Force orders 2,200 PlayStation 3s - Air Force News, news from Iraq - Air Force Times

The Air Force is ordering 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3s, but it won’t be using them to play “Call of Duty 4.”

The video-game consoles will be networked together to create a massive computing cluster that will be used for special projects at an Air Force Research Laboratory center in Rome, N.Y.

The service is expanding its stock of 336 PlayStations, which are linked in 14 clusters of 24, with a powerful “compute node” attached to each cluster.

Mark Barnell, high performance computing director for AFRL’s information directorate, said he expects the PlayStations to cost about $650,000, and the entire project to cost less than $2 million. The consoles are inexpensive, he said, because the price of manufacturing them is effectively subsidized by gamers.