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

On Jun 11, 7:53 am, Neal <nealcr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 7:32 am, Air Raid <AirRaid...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > 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.
>
> Though the CELL may prove more useful, it still has some serious arch
> issues that a lot of people don't like. Programming the thing is not
> the easiest thing in the world to do (though parallel programming
> models for CMPs are somewhat of an open issue). It's nice that they
> will continue to push performance, but many GPUs will be well above
> 1TFLOPS SPFP by 2010... which means that obviously Larrabee will be
> out then. While I'm glad that CELL came out as it's enlightened the
> world and solved several of the multicore integration problems, it
> simply doesn't seem like the chip of the future right now. I simply
> haven't heard a whole lot of interest from the HPC community on CELL,
> but you never know... I could be wrong.

AMD's  RV770 GPU coming out this month is already at 1 TFLOP  and the
R700 product with two RV770 GPUs on a single card (4870 X2) which is
due out this August or September  should be around 2 TFLOP.   Of
course this is a GPU (or GPGPUs)  and is not as programmable as
CELL.

The Larrabee should however, change that.  I think Larrabee and
anything like it, with a manycore architecture (beyond multicore) is
the future.  It'll be interesting to see how the next-gen CELL
compares to Larrabee.