Re: Roadrunner Supercomputer using 12,960 CELL Processors Hits 1

On Jun 11, 4:32 am, already5cho...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> On the positive note, successful testing of the Roadrunner means that
> IBM has the ability to manufacture a new variant  of Cell with fully-
> pipelined double-precision FPU in production quantity.
> IBM web site indicates that a new engine is available to mere
mortals:http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index...



Interesting thing about the IBM PowerXCell 8i   Processor is that it
offers 4 to 5 (IBM says 5)  times the double precision FP performance
of the original Cell Processor.

Depending on various factors such as having 7 or 8 SPEs active,
counting the PPE or not counting it, and clockspeed, the original CELL
could manage 218 to 256 to just under 300 GFLOPs of single precision
FP.  When double precision is needed performance drops massively, down
to around 25 GFLOPs.

The  IBM PowerXCell 8i is said to be capable of over 100 GFLOPs
double precision.  That's a huge increase without adding more SPEs or
upping clockspeed.

 PowerXCell 8i  cannot be considered a next-generation CELL,  only an
enhanced first-gen CELL.

IBM plans to put 32 SPEs on the next-gen CELL to hit 1 TFLOP (single
precision I would imagine) in a single chip by 2010.  There was also
an official roadmap that showed  a CELL with 64 SPEs  on a process
smaller than 45nm (be it 32nm, 22nm, I don't know).   I posted about
both in the past.

It's clear that the IBM-To****ba-Sony CELL is proving to be much more
useful beyond  PS3 than the Sony-To****ba 'Emotion Engine' ever was,
which really had no use outside of PS2 and cheap, home-made university
"supercomputers' such as the one using 60 or 70 PS2s at UIC in IL.

Roadrunner is serious stuff, and it's only the beginning. In the next
decade we'll see more powerful supercomputers using next-gen CELLs.