As the countdown to today’s Cell presentation, held at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco ticks by, more speculation is emerging as to what may be announced.
Following on from various memo leaks and even what purports to be a presentation slide, comes some in-depth analysis from Tom Halfhill of the Microprocessor Report. Speaking to News.com, Halfhill aims to throw some light on the mysterious Sony, IBM and Toshiba co-developed processor.
For reference, the slide claims a 4.6 GHz clock speed shifting 6.4 GB per second off-chip communication with a CPU temp of 85 degrees C.
The cell has, built in to its design, the idea of distributed processing. A large task can be split across multiple cores on multiple chips on multiple devices across a network. All without the programmer having to worry about it at all. Your TV or stereo could help the PS3 to render a scene if they were based on cell and networked together, an incredible feat if delivered effectively. The cell processor is capable of running different tasks on each of its cores (called software cells) instead of just breaking up the same task across the cores. "The software cells are designed to be kind of self-contained--they can kind of roam around," Halfhill said.
"The Cell architecture is designed to make grid computing almost universal," Halfhill continued. "It makes distributed processing part of the design. If you have several of these machines on a network, the work can be spread across a network."
The cell also has memory protection built in to the chip. A process can only access the memory it is allocated by the system. Normally this is done by the OS, and hence can be got around by naughty code. On cell that's not possible, since the memory divisions are managed by the hardware.
"A lot of [piracy] techniques rely on one application being able to access the same memory region as another application," Halfhill said. "With Cell, you can't do that because memory regions are locked down by the application. What they're doing to fence off this memory requires a lot of memory access," he said. "It looks to me like a pretty cumbersome system. There's got to be some performance hit, and they're going to have to optimize the final design to get around that."
Check back here tomorrow for a full outline of exactly what is announced by Sony, IBM and Toshiba.