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> I have not read the book, but I have a hard time imagining any world in which the Cell could possibly be successful. Its heterogeneous architecture thrust a h

> I have not read the book, but I have a hard time imagining any world in which the Cell could possibly be successful. Its heterogeneous architecture thrust a huge amount of complexity onto software developers in exchange for meager gains. Writing good code for it was difficult and expensive compared to other platforms. Sony was just completely out of touch with reality. This was a different time. At that time researchers tried to build clusters out of PS3s - because the speed advantages of the Cell made it worth and "regular" Cell clusters were much more expensive. Some years later GPGPU became feasible and one could forsee that it will become faster than the Cell, too, in near future - and at that time the same kind of researchers dropped their PS3 clusters and built GPGPU clusters. Don't tell me that particular in the beginning GPGPU was easier to program for than the Cell. It was also the time when Apple switched to Intel CPUs. I know at that time IBM was also trying to sell the Cell to Apple, but Steve Jobs refused and decided for Intel instead. This decision of Apple and the decisions of researchers to stop tinkering with PS3 clusters and build GPGPU clusters instead were in my opinion the two landslides after which the fate of the Cell was destinied.

slavik81 9y ago
I'm sorry, but I pretty much entirely disagree. > Don't tell me that particular in the beginning GPGPU was easier to program for than the Cell. The alternative was to use bog-standard homogeneous cores. Yes, the air force bought a compute cluster of PS3s for some specialized calculations. I wouldn't read too much into that. It says little about the suitability of the architecture for more general purpose computing. Supercomputers were always weird. > It was also the time when Apple switched to Intel CPUs. I don't believe there was much chance of Apple moving to Cell. Their switch to Intel was because IBM could no longer seriously compete outside of a few niches. There's nothing positive to infer from IBM's unsuccessful pitch to Jobs. > This decision of Apple and the decisions of researchers to stop tinkering with PS3 clusters and build GPGPU clusters instead were in my opinion the two landslides after which the fate of the Cell was destinied. You're assigning far more importance to research group purchases than I think is warranted. They don't buy enough to create economies of scale. That's why researchers so frequently adopt consumer products already manufactured at scale, like the Novint Falcon, Microsoft Kinect, and gaming graphics cards. The Cell was best-in-class for a few specialized use cases, but it was never going to take the world by storm. If we turn to a heterogeneous architecture in the future, it will be begrudgingly, after all simpler alternatives have been exhausted.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > You're assigning far more importance to research group purchases than I think is warranted. They don't buy enough to create economies of scale. That's why researchers so frequently adopt consumer products already manufactured at scale, like the Novint Falcon, Microsoft Kinect, and gaming graphics cards. This is true, but in the consequences I have to disagree: Very often from this kind of "abusing" consumer products for research purposes there emerge quite interesting applications that do become quite popular and economically important. For example from such research there came the idea to use the Kinect as a 3D scanner - from this commercial applications emerged. Or from GPGPU (which at the beginning NVidia was quite the opposite of enthusiastic about) CUDA and later OpenCL emerged (which is much better to program for than abusing vertex and fragment shaders). That is why I considered it is quite important for the future of the Cell when researchers went from tinkered PS3 clusters to GPGPU and called this a "landslide event for the future of the Cell".
Animats 9y ago
It's not that it's heterogeneous. It's that each Cell processor only had 256K of RAM. K, not M. For code and data. You can pump data in and out from main memory in bulk, but random access is very slow. So it's only useful for tasks that work like an assembly line - data flows in sequentially, gets processed, and output is pumped out. Great for audio. Lousy for everything else in games. If you had 16MB on each CPU, the little CPUs might be useable. You might be able to run physics or pathfinding or NPCs in one.

slavik81 9y ago

I'm sorry, but I pretty much entirely disagree. > Don't tell me that particular in the beginning GPGPU was easier to program for than the Cell. The alternative was to use bog-standard homogeneous cores. Yes, the air force bought a compute cluster of PS3s for some specialized calculations. I wouldn't read too much into that. It says little about the suitability of the architecture for more general purpose computing. Supercomputers were always weird. > It was also the time when Apple switched to Intel CPUs. I don't believe there was much chance of Apple moving to Cell. Their switch to Intel was because IBM could no longer seriously compete outside of a few niches. There's nothing positive to infer from IBM's unsuccessful pitch to Jobs. > This decision of Apple and the decisions of researchers to stop tinkering with PS3 clusters and build GPGPU clusters instead were in my opinion the two landslides after which the fate of the Cell was destinied. You're assigning far more importance to research group purchases than I think is warranted. They don't buy enough to create economies of scale. That's why researchers so frequently adopt consumer products already manufactured at scale, like the Novint Falcon, Microsoft Kinect, and gaming graphics cards. The Cell was best-in-class for a few specialized use cases, but it was never going to take the world by storm. If we turn to a heterogeneous architecture in the future, it will be begrudgingly, after all simpler alternatives have been exhausted.

wolfgke 9y ago
> You're assigning far more importance to research group purchases than I think is warranted. They don't buy enough to create economies of scale. That's why researchers so frequently adopt consumer products already manufactured at scale, like the Novint Falcon, Microsoft Kinect, and gaming graphics cards. This is true, but in the consequences I have to disagree: Very often from this kind of "abusing" consumer products for research purposes there emerge quite interesting applications that do become quite popular and economically important. For example from such research there came the idea to use the Kinect as a 3D scanner - from this commercial applications emerged. Or from GPGPU (which at the beginning NVidia was quite the opposite of enthusiastic about) CUDA and later OpenCL emerged (which is much better to program for than abusing vertex and fragment shaders). That is why I considered it is quite important for the future of the Cell when researchers went from tinkered PS3 clusters to GPGPU and called this a "landslide event for the future of the Cell".

Animats 9y ago

It's not that it's heterogeneous. It's that each Cell processor only had 256K of RAM. K, not M. For code and data. You can pump data in and out from main memory in bulk, but random access is very slow. So it's only useful for tasks that work like an assembly line - data flows in sequentially, gets processed, and output is pumped out. Great for audio. Lousy for everything else in games. If you had 16MB on each CPU, the little CPUs might be useable. You might be able to run physics or pathfinding or NPCs in one.