I am waiting for the unveiling of the cell processor board by Sony and Nvidea at SIGGRAPH starting tomorrow (Aug 5th to 9th). This promises to be one of the most exciting moments in recent computing history.
According to a short statement by Sony, the so-called “Cell Computing Board†incorporates the high-performance Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor developed jointly by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and RSX graphics processor created by Nvidia and Sony. The combination of the two key-components of the PlayStation 3 “results in high computational performance capable of handling large amounts of data at high speed while also achieving reductions in size and energy consumptionâ€.
I am in the process of staging a Lanner FW1200 1-U rack unit with a new probe software. It seems the cell board from Sony uses 400W and can fit in a 1-U Rack mount as well.
Peak processing power of the Cell Computing Board is 230GFLOPS, according to the statement, while peak energy consumption is 400W, which is 20W higher compared to the PlayStation 3 game console. The current Cell Computing Board can be embedded in a 1U (unit) sized server and mounted on a 19†rack, which points to enterprise usage scenario of the device.
I was aware about the Playstation 3’s use of the cell processor, but an article in Dr Dobbs Journal greatly enhanced my interest in this architecture. See “Programming the Cell Processor“. I believe this is an architecture that can take network / security analysis to a completely new level without involving supercomputer type costs.
I am still learning about the power of this platform, I will blog about it as and when I make progress learning it. This ought to be fun.
My starting points :
The Cell Processor Home Page at IBM Research
I want to see if it is worthwhile to buy a PS-3 and use it as a learning platform.
[tags] Sony, Cell Processor, Playstation – 3 [/tags]
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