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I'm a bit slow on the uptake ... but does this remind anyone of the Cell architecture? How different are those two architectures?
by hosh 13y ago
I'm a bit slow on the uptake ... but does this remind anyone of the Cell architecture? How different are those two architectures?
- m_mueller 13y agoCell was neither x86 for the main cores, nor had sufficient industry standards and tooling ready (OpenCL, LLVM, OpenGL, DirectX..) for the accelerator part. AMD's new offering is fully intended for mass market, while Cell was a strange mixture of HPC architecture and PS3 processor. I'd say AMD has a significantly higher chance for success, these new chips should be pretty much a no brainer for mid-end media/ gaming PCs. If they can scale it down to a much lower TDP, it could also become interesting for 'Surface Pro class' (if you can call that a class) tablets.
- chillingeffect 13y agoiirc, Cell architecture was FPUs with a stack swapper. I.e. using scheduling to maximize use of limited FPUs on a large amount of memory. The main innovation here is a tightly coupled cpu and gpu memory space. Prior to this, CPU and GPU mem were separate. To get data into the GPU (and out), it had to be shoved under the door via DMA. To maximize this, some Cell-like scheduling could be used.... But now, CPU and GPU share the same memory. e.g. malloc(1<<20) and either GPU or CPU can work on that buffer! No crazy scheduling needed. Also, the cache can be configed so both CPU and GPU access share it.
- Arelius 13y agoAbout as different as the standard CPU/GPU combo is from Cell. This is literally a CPU, with a GPU, with a cache coherent memory bus. The Cell on the other hand is a PowerPC unit, mated with a few Vector FPU units, with no direct memory access. Then a seperate MMU is setup that's able to handle DMA copy's for everything.