Now that the OSW prototypes are being produced poor Genesi engineering staff does not know what to spend their time on (who needs holidays???). Before they get too bored i have a suggestion! Taadaaa! Cell based PCIe addon card for OSW and/or *cough* PeeeCeees *cough*

It seems that quite some people are impressed with the performance the Cell can deliver. Mercury is working on a card too but as always their products are a _bit_ pricey. The card could be used if utilised right for end users (media encoding), scientific purposes (Google Cure@PS3), or for developing for cell based products. No need to emulate the Cell in software, if the real thing is in... IBM surely will lend a helping hand too.

So how about it?

...probably not this year.

R&B

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Probably? Fine!

the year's nearly over anyway....

Seems like there's been lots of talk about a Cell-based add-on card on multiple forums. For the record I'd buy a card like this, but how much I'm willing to spend would be determined by the usefulness I could get out of it.

What are some of the potential uses for this type of card aside from development work? Do these cards come with both a processor and memory? I'm assuming you could compile software directly on the card, but would you also be able to run the software (for instance an Linux kernel) on the card and create a working environment?

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Joshua Purcell

Here you have Mercury Systems' Cell-on-PCI card.
The price? "Starting at 7999 USD".

Yeah as said: Mercury products _always_ seem a bit pricey. Some big company will bring out a device with 1 Cell, Ram, enclosure , power supply and a blu-ray drive, a 20 GB hard drive for 599 Euro. So if someone want's he surely can make add on cards for(much) less than 7999 Dollars.
<Edit>
I would think such a card should have (like Graphics card's do) on board memory on it because using main memory through PCIe should be too slow for CELL (at least is it designed for using XDR Ram as memory).
The first post mentiones some applications. Only one seems to be practical for home use in the first place - Media encoding (MPEG2, H.264, VC1, MP3 and so on).
Scientific use could be:
Protein folding, maybe Genome research.

As it seems also Supercomputers will be enhanced with CELL addon cards. So there would be a large opportunity for Genesi selling such a product in large quantities to all Kinds of customers.

I for one had the hope after some Sony Guy came on stage at a Apple conference and they made some strange announcment that they are working on something, that Apple will bring out a CELL enhanced G5 Workstation.
Unfortunately this didn't work out. Apple with their core audio/video should have been (is?) the ideal target for CELL integration.
</Edit>

Bye

Some information about CELL:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6832279023.html
http://cell.scei.co.jp/e_download.html
http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputin ... chain.html
http://www.power.org/resources/devcorner/cellcorner/


About the price: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/for ... 3007769731

Folding@Home and CELL:
http://folding.stanford.edu/news.html
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

CELL running Mac OS X: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr-R4bUZIQw

Regards
Karl

Edit: Another nice tidbit, anyone interested in an Octo-Core PPC-System?
http://www.cwcembedded.com/products/0/2/402.html

Nice links, found the discussion once at ars but never found it again. The video from youtube - Is it really OSX runnig on Cell?

You can see the Apple logo on the top left, you can see the Dock and Finder, IMO.

Edit: The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger)

newsflash: a operating system written for a PowerPC platform can run on a PowerPC platform given you have pretty drivers for it.

Could you please cut this quite wild claims?

btw I can run anything on a screen given I can use the wonders of X network layer...

PS: If you are so interested on macosx you'd better have it run on a G5 (OSW where are you ;_;? ), the PPE of the Cell would require a rebuild or your programs with a improved gcc if you don't want to feel quite disappointed. (the instruction scheduling is quite different from a G5 or a G4)

Thats why i ask: If it is OSX in the video (yes there is something like the finder and the dock, too tiny to be sure...could be a skinned MorphOS too. ) and it is running this simulation that "would render half a frame per second on a G5" at 20(?) fps i wonder where they got the (rebuild) OSX for Cell from? Or would it only the render engine to be written for Cell and OSX running on MacOnLinux? They also could start a video saying "This is Cell rendering something in realtime..."

But damn we're going OT.

Or simply it is streaming the rendered from another box...

Wow. You can buy 10 Playstation 3's for that.

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Matt Sealey

A Cell processor on a PCI or PCI-Express would kill off all need for this;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physx

$300 "Physics processor". Sony licensed the physics engine for PS3.

and this;

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=MjEwNjYsLCwsLCwx

Unknown price, simply for doing AI calculations.

Of course ATI is now bringing out solutions to do all of this in a Radeon X1600+ GPU in another slot in your system, for half the price of those two cards. Of course, again, this means having a system with 4 graphics chips in it.. just to render a fire and have a monster run around it instead of through it..

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Matt Sealey