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Geek Culture / IBM & Co's new monster for the PlayStation 3 - the "Cell"

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MicroMan
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 03:28
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I've been reading about the new CPU chip, the "Cell", that is rumoured to be part of the new PlayStation 3. Looks good. I'm not done salivating. Though, I have to admit to being sceptical about it...

It just sounds too good to be true...

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html

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GothOtaku
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 04:32
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Yeah, I heard about this a while ago. The concept was developed 10 years ago but no one bothered doing anything with it until recently. However, no one's seen conclusive proof that it's been implemented so as to make good on it's claims.
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MicroMan
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 04:38
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That's the feeling I've got too. There's no conclusive proof - however I did like one part of the multi-document I linked to that just 8 of these things (i.e. 8 PS3s) in a cluster would put that cluster on the top 500 of the world's supercomputers...

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GothOtaku
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 05:42
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The other thing is supposed to be the architecture of the future... and it was designed for the PS3?! Power is good and all but I find it odd that they would put this much effort into allowing you to make a supercomputer out of a console.
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Sol462
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 05:42
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might be a little too expensive for anyone wanting a PS3 though.

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MicroMan
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 07:21
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But OTOH perhaps awesome power is what is needed to knock out the x486 technology? God knows there's been better technology out there that should have knocked the Intel-hegemony out of the water at various times.

Remember the Amiga? It was years ahead of the PC when it was still alive. There's also the SuperSPARC that Sun cancelled. That was better than the x486. In fact, there's been a number of chips that had been superior to the x486 - but which has fallen under the PC-onslaught.

The reason being for all that is of course the massive advantage the PC has in its software base. Perhaps awesome power is the only thing that can counter the software base of the PC...

That is of course mere speculation, but possibly it is sound speculation. I wouldn't hold my breath about it.

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Van B
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 17:50
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The Atari Falcon was a pretty good contender, I mean when it was released the PC's available pailed in comparison, it was more like a nice Macintosh than a PC. It could easily have been a cheap alternative to the Mac for DTP and graphics - and in a class of it's own for sound production and music, the PC lagged behind for ages in those areas. Bad marketing is always a killer.


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BatVink
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 18:19
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So Cell architecture is about distributed processing on a grand and turbocharged scale.

And they're going to put it into a games console first. IBM are involved, but the Playstation takes precedence over business machines that would blow current mainframe,midrange and their iSeries machines out of the water.

Whatever.

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MicroMan
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 19:26
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Perhaps if they put it in a "mere" gamesmachine they can reach volumes that will push down the price for it? I mean, the playstation franchise does have a big user base that would be easier to coach into switching to that new thing. If they built a new computer and sold it, perhaps it would go the way of the NeXt machine?

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BatVink
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 21:15 Edited at: 4th Feb 2005 21:27
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Put it in an iSeries, the World's most popular business machine, and you can sell it for up to $950,000 - that's around 4,000 Playstation 2 sales per single Enterprise iSeries sale. iSeries is already Power5 based, which is what they speculate Cell chips will be built around.

Something somewhere doesn't add up I suspect the Illuminati, or aliens.

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MicroMan
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 21:33 Edited at: 4th Feb 2005 21:34
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Wll, of course - as I said from the start - it is probably too good to be true. Sue me, I'm a cynic about these things. This isn't even vapourware, after all.

But then again, the market for supercomputers is pretty small, and consists mostly of prestige and not that much cash. On the server side IBM is dominant. The zSeries (and to a certain extent the iSeries) comes with a lot of other stuff besides speed: transparent fail-over, built in resource planning and allocation... and stability that makes it fail (statistically speaking) once in a billion years. Or something like that...

But apart from that, what if...? I could want one of those things.

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Van B
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Posted: 4th Feb 2005 23:52
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I'm not convinced.

Silicon is not the next generation base material that we need for this technology, until we get a better base material we can only go so far. It sounds too much like the blurb we heard about the PS2, like how it was so powerful and capable, expectations were high, and they fell very short.


Van-B


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The admiral
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Posted: 5th Feb 2005 04:08
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Yea its most likely that this crystal stuff will be moving us in the next generation of materials we use.

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BatVink
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Posted: 5th Feb 2005 06:57 Edited at: 5th Feb 2005 06:59
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Quote: "stability that makes it fail (statistically speaking) once in a billion years"


...I got clients that can kill a Midrange machine dead in 24 hours, I had one last week.

They had just one query running, which was destined to write just over 10 billion records, because they failed to add a JOIN for one file. 24 hours later, it was still running, no-one noticed, and the disk was at 98.5%. The System Operator message queue was screaming at them...no-one noticed. The files were set to NOMAX, which basically means they'll keep expanding forever. There was no facility for the server to IPL itself. They were literally less than an hour away from bringing the entire business to a grinding halt.

A couple of weeks ago somebody lost their machine to a power-cut...they had no UPS!

When IBM say their machines are stable, they assume their customers are competent. Put the two together and they are stable. But this country still suffers from the legacy of accounts departments doubling as an IT department.

[EDIT] For those that don't play with Midrange machines, getting them back up after a failure is like trying to get a beached whale back in the water.

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MicroMan
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Posted: 5th Feb 2005 18:33
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New compo, perhaps? WHo can kill a midrange machine fastest?

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BatVink
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Posted: 7th Feb 2005 17:34 Edited at: 7th Feb 2005 17:35
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It's in the BBC News, apparently it will be unveiled today as the new Playstation 3 chip.

It also says it will be used initially in servers and workstations.

I find it very bizarre that such a capable chip is targetting both markets on it's launch. This is a big sign that computers and media are becoming one and the same.

BBC News Story

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MicroMan
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Posted: 7th Feb 2005 17:58
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I still find it difficult to believe in. Perhaps I've been burnt too many times by corporate hype.

It would indeed be sweet if such a thing emerged given its power. Or perhaps it would not be sweet at all because won't the requirements for this technology effectively kill off amateur game making?

Can any small coding group hope to compete on a quality basis with the big dragons who can stream films directly into games with these monsters? Now an amateur group can, theoretically, create a game, but if the bar of expectancy on the consumer's part is raised excorbitantly high by technology then amateur game makers could be hindered from realizing their ideas simply by the weight of the requirements for production. Ie you'd have to have a full media lab to be able to produce mere acceptable media for a game?

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Van B
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Posted: 7th Feb 2005 18:37
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Microman,
Those concearns have been going on through the ages mate, for instance when messing around on 8-bit machines I did'nt imagine I'd end up making games with real graphics, and on the 16-bit machines I did'nt for a minute think I'd end up making 3D games on a PC, and when I started on 3D games I did'nt think I'd be making my own media for everything. We will no doubt have to adapt at some point, but so must companies like TGC - if we all end up using a different style of processor, then they have to move with their customer base.

Of course it'll take decades for traditional PC technology to be phazed out, so there'll always be someone to play our games - heck I get more fun out of emulators than most PC games anyway.


Van-B


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MicroMan
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Posted: 7th Feb 2005 18:51
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@Van B

I realize that there's been a technology jump between 8 - 16 - 32 - 64 bit, and so on. I don't really believe it will be so terrible, and we will still have to see if the corporate hype of this cell-thing is true.

But still, it seems that previously there's been a jump to a high ground, but if the abilities of this thing proves correct then perhaps you need a backpack rocket to jump the distance required to this new level.

Still, as you said, amateur game making has been pronounced dead before, and the "corpse" is still very lively indeed. So, I won't do that here. However, if the hype is true, then we'd all better get used to a new paradigm of game making - particularly in distributed processing...

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The admiral
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Posted: 8th Feb 2005 12:58 Edited at: 8th Feb 2005 15:30
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I find it a little hard to beleive its 10 times faster than current technology especially if its being developed for a games console.....It will probably cost ten billion dollars for just one hopefully down with playstation burn playstation.

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JeBuS
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Posted: 8th Feb 2005 13:45
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It's not that it's 10x faster, it's that it's 10x more efficient at what it does. Just as AMD procs are more efficient than Intel, so will these be over either.


High quality models and graphics, low prices. Graphics for the rest of us.
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