PlayStation 3 architecture revealed
Playstation 3's out, and it was revealed at a sony conference in Japan. You can watch the entire conference at: http://www.gamespot.com
The architecture of PS3 is interesting. It Uses cutting-edge research from high performance computing. PS3 uses "cell" microprocessors. It diverts from what non-cell microprocessors have been trying to achieve for the past decade: improved branch prediction to boost the performance of single-threaded applications.
The cell micprocessor concept drifts away from this pursuit, and employs maximum additional hardware resources for performing parallelizable multimedia-type operations, at the cost of allocating minimum resources for single-threaded computations. At an operating frequency of 4 GHz, the CELL processor is thus capable of achieving a peak throughput rate of 256 GFlops (Flops=floating point operations per second) from the 8 SPE's (Synergistic processing element).
PS3 uses multiple cell processors, and one can imagine the amount of processing power it has. It is interesting, since now it will become increasingly difficult to program for PS3.
Acknowledgements:
How branch prediction works in the Intel family: http://www.x86.org/articles/branch/branchprediction.htm
The cell microprocessor:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT021005084318
The architecture of PS3 is interesting. It Uses cutting-edge research from high performance computing. PS3 uses "cell" microprocessors. It diverts from what non-cell microprocessors have been trying to achieve for the past decade: improved branch prediction to boost the performance of single-threaded applications.
The cell micprocessor concept drifts away from this pursuit, and employs maximum additional hardware resources for performing parallelizable multimedia-type operations, at the cost of allocating minimum resources for single-threaded computations. At an operating frequency of 4 GHz, the CELL processor is thus capable of achieving a peak throughput rate of 256 GFlops (Flops=floating point operations per second) from the 8 SPE's (Synergistic processing element).
PS3 uses multiple cell processors, and one can imagine the amount of processing power it has. It is interesting, since now it will become increasingly difficult to program for PS3.
Acknowledgements:
How branch prediction works in the Intel family: http://www.x86.org/articles/branch/branchprediction.htm
The cell microprocessor:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT021005084318
posted by rashed at 3:25 AM
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