Back in 2005, a new type of processor was prototyped with the goal of powering the most advanced console ever seen as well as the next-generation supercomputers: the Cell Broadband Engine. The Cell Broadband Engine, also known as the CBE or Cell, was a revolutionary design made by STI, an alliance formed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM with the goal of building the processor of the future. Their design took a single high-performance IBM PowerPC core clocked at 3.2GHz with support for two simultaneous threads, and put it on the same die as eight special cores designed with a single goal: to execute numerical calculations as fast as possible. The result was the Cell Broadband Engine, a heterogeneous architecture processor that used a single CPU core, the Power Processing Element or PPE, for general purpose tasks as well as supplying data to the eight Synergistic Processing Elements, which provided supercomputer-level performance at raw number crunching.
The resulting chip was used to power the PlayStation 3, coupled with a respectable 256MB of blazing-fast XDR RAM as well as the Nvidia RSX "Reality Synthesizer". The other specs were impressive, but the Cell was the real star of the show. After the PlayStation 3 debuted on November 11, 2006, IBM set its sights on something bigger: making an improved Cell processor to power the next generation of servers. The resulting chip, the PowerXCell8i, was used in the IBM BladeCenter QS22 server as well as the IBM Roadrunner, the first petascale supercomputer. It looked like the future had arrived. Except, in 2013 the IBM Roadrunner was dismantled and the PlayStation 4 launched with a conventional x86_64 processor. No new developments after the PowerXCell8i were made to the Cell Broadband Engine. Why was this? My theory is based upon one of the PlayStation 3's shortcomings as well as some digging I did into IBM documentation: the Cell Broadband Engine created a positively garish experience for developers, and Nvidia's CUDA-enabled GPUs were faster and able to be integrated with existing systems. In addition to the daunting obstacles Cell's API posed to developers, Cell also received limited adoption and was only available in high-end servers and the RAM-tied PS3, neither of which was suitable for the masses. In this sense it was inevitable that CUDA eclipsed Cell, it was accessible to anyone with a computer and $350 to buy an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, which was almost a match for the Cell in raw throughput and had double the memory of the PS3. Since then CUDA took off and we never looked back.
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DanielI'm a software engineer, volunteer IT support, amateur blogger, casual gamer, and tech enthusiast. I also love cars and the great outdoors. Archives
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