The market seems to think the IBM "cell" chip a replacement to Intel/AMD
CPU.
But from the description, it seems to me it is another GPU like ATI or
NVidia has right now? What do you guys think?
It's far more than a GPU. Make that an array og GPUs tightly coupled to an
array of 64b CPUs and you have a closer approximation. We'll see if
software can keep up with the hardware.
Did IBM hire Gray's Connection Machine team to design "Cell"?
Ar said:The market seems to think the IBM "cell" chip a replacement to Intel/AMD
CPU. But from the description, it seems to me it is another GPU like ATI or
NVidia has right now? What do you guys think?
Ar Q said:The market seems to think the IBM "cell" chip a replacement to Intel/AMD
CPU. But from the description, it seems to me it is another GPU like ATI or
NVidia has right now? What do you guys think?
I mean Cray.Ar Q said:Did IBM hire Gray's Connection Machine team to design "Cell"?
)-()-( said:Ar Q wrote:
Sounds like a DSP type chip. That's TI's area of expertise. I don't think it's
a GPU.
The descriptions I've read so far make it sound like basically a
Power series GPU core surrounded by a bunch of much smaller DSP
cores. It is apparently going to be a true multi-core chip and
not a multi-chip package.
definite negatory. The CPU market is one thing, but the x86 CPU market
of which Intel and AMD are the two biggest members are quite another
market. No matter how much performance a competing architecture brings
to bear, it's still never good enough to be considered a replacement
for x86. The only thing that's good enough to replace an x86 is
another x86.
Just look at the relative success of Opteron vs. Itanium.
Mark Hahn said:here's a match I'd love to see: AMD buys Transmeta. why? mainly because
The Cell chip is basically a variant of the PowerPC chips that IBM
puts in everything from laser printers to Apple Macintoshes to IBM's
own mainframes. It's meant to be a general purpose CPU, but it does
have some elements of what a GPU has. But I think it's much closer to
the CPU role than the GPU role.
As for whether it's a replacement for the Intel/AMD chips, that's a
definite negatory. The CPU market is one thing, but the x86 CPU market
of which Intel and AMD are the two biggest members are quite another
market. No matter how much performance a competing architecture brings
to bear, it's still never good enough to be considered a replacement
for x86. The only thing that's good enough to replace an x86 is
another x86. Just look at the relative success of Opteron vs. Itanium.
Yousuf Khan
Mark Hahn said:that's a bit of an overstatement - transmeta has found a corner of
the x86 market where a non-x86 can do some damage. sure, they haven't
taken over the world, but they're certainly viable.
look at the routes these chips took. opteron tweaked the existing,
fairly boring athlon core, put a nicer cache on it, great memory interface,
and elegant system infrastructure. considering how little AMD has improved
their core over the years, their success is amazing. quite a contrast
to the it2, whose raison-d'etre was to do a new core ISA from scratch.
here's a match I'd love to see: AMD buys Transmeta. why? mainly because
Transmeta has higher-order, firmware-based insight into performance.
for instance, Transmeta can implement using a hard+soft combination,
more intelligence in predicting branches, or in predicting computed ld/st
addresses, or even in predicting values.
Eddie Grove said:I don't want to see AMD buy anybody. But coincidentally, there's
a quasi-AMD-Transmeta agreement today.
Fujitsu just announced that it licensed some tech from Transmeta.
The significance is that AMD and Fujitsu are partners in flash
memory in a unit called Spansion. The press release wasn't too
specific so I can't really guess if Spansion was relevant to the
agreement.
that's a bit of an overstatement - transmeta has found a corner of
the x86 market where a non-x86 can do some damage. sure, they haven't
taken over the world, but they're certainly viable.
it's very intresting to compare. for instance, the it2 has been pushed
very hard ahead of demand, and hasn't exactly shone. but the opteron has
been anti-marketed by AMD (ie, yes, it does run windows, but most
windows-on-opteron is in brain-damaged Intel-compatible mode).
so the
Opteron has a big bump to performance just waiting for someone in
Redmond to take advantage of it. the it2 desperately needs a perf bump,
since at least one large company has staked its enterprise line on it.
and the it2 perf bump doesn't seem forthcoming.
look at the routes these chips took. opteron tweaked the existing,
fairly boring athlon core, put a nicer cache on it, great memory
interface, and elegant system infrastructure.
considering how little
AMD has improved their core over the years, their success is amazing.
quite a contrast to the it2, whose raison-d'etre was to do a new core
ISA from scratch. Intel/HP have always claimed that EPIC's design was
motivated by wanting to scale performance into the stratosphere. alas,
for current it2's at least, where performance is good happens to be
places where the entire application+dataset fit into cache. would
it2-9m be faster than an opteron with 9M cache? I doubt it. what does
that say about Intel/HP's innovation-in-ISA?
and multicore is not going to save it2. it'll give a nice tweak to
performance under some loads, no doubt. but since it2's competitors
will probably go multicore before it,
Intel gets no relative advantage.
and after all, it2-multicore is essentially just making up for the fact
that the it2 ISA designers are so hostile to out-of-order. one of those
mysteries - if OOO is such a bad thing, why have other chip design teams
been able to push it so far? no doubt the OOO designs have been harder
because of the OOO, but has the it2 taken advantage of this to push
other aspects of performance, or to have a shorter time-to-market?
unless you count obscene onchip caches as an ISA innovation, I just
don't see where the it2 is winning.
here's a match I'd love to see: AMD buys Transmeta.
Gack!
why? mainly
because Transmeta has higher-order, firmware-based insight into
performance.
for instance, Transmeta can implement using a hard+soft
combination, more intelligence in predicting branches, or in predicting
computed ld/st addresses, or even in predicting values.
suppose you can
accurately predict when a store writes to an address which won't be used
any time soon.
why not write it through to dram? no sense in wasting a
cacheline on that.
predicting loads, of course, is even better, since
they tend to stall, but stores can be posted. but can you afford to
treat every load the same way you do branches (with a multi-state FSM to
predict the outcome)? perhaps not in hardware, but maybe in firmware
(maybe even encoded in your internal instruction stream, since AMD
already does cache partially decoded instructions, though doesnt' go as
far as Intel's trace cache...)
that's a bit of an overstatement - transmeta has found a corner of
the x86 market where a non-x86 can do some damage. sure, they haven't
taken over the world, but they're certainly viable.
it's very intresting to compare. for instance, the it2 has been
pushed very hard ahead of demand, and hasn't exactly shone.
but the opteron has been anti-marketed by AMD (ie, yes, it does
run windows, but most windows-on-opteron is in brain-damaged
Intel-compatible mode).
so the Opteron has a big bump to performance
just waiting for someone in Redmond to take advantage of it.
the it2 desperately needs a perf bump, since at least one large
company has staked its enterprise line on it. and the it2 perf bump
doesn't seem forthcoming.
and multicore is not going to save it2.
Perhaps the lesson here is that the ISA was never the problem. Yeah,
it's difficult to believe after years of us being cult-indoctrinated
to believe x86 was evil; that it was about to leave this planet for
good and never show its ugly face ever again; that it's still here,
and doing better than ever.
keith said:I think this is over-stated. First, Transmetta *is* x86. They haven't
released their internal ISA, so it's x86 on the outside. Second, I don't
think Transmetta is viable. I don't see it lasting long without a major
float.
Tony Hill said:The whole idea of Itanium is that it has a fairly simple core