First Next-Gen CELL Processor: 2 PPEs - 32 SPEs - at least 1 Teraflop
|
From: Robert Myers on 10 Dec 2006 13:26 Piotr Wyderski wrote: > Robert Myers wrote: > > > As we are going now, the US is aiming to be a second or third class > > player in technology and science, and much of the negative leadership > > is coming from players who think themselves the brightest thing in the > > firmament. > > So simply do not buy their products and let their competitors fulfill > your needs. If you are wrong, nobody will see the difference and > the mistake will be your problem. If you are right, the competitors' > income will increase, so it will become IBM's problem. > Your post reflects a common misunderstanding of how the US has worked since World War II. Contrary to popular opinion, we do not have a free market economy. We have [had] a Keynsian economy driven by military spending, which has also driven much of science and technology. Blue Gene is a perfect example. It was not driven by market economics, but by a specific need of a bomb lab. Without that customer, Blue Gene would not exist, or certainly not at the scale and with the visibility it has now. IBM has been reasonably shrewd in trying to leverage those nuclear weapons dollars into other business, but that doesn't change the reality of how the money flows. My criticism was not aimed at IBM. Robert.
From: Robert Myers on 10 Dec 2006 13:42 Del Cecchi wrote: > > At the very least those making suggestions should think about and discuss > tradeoffs involved. > Either you or I could probably have advanced the discussion more by pointing out that the Cell architecture is fairly flexible and that IBM would probably be more than happy to work out almost any kind of conceivable arrangement of licensing, design, and manufacturing, if only the dollars worked. IBM has taken a leadership role. If I'm less than dazzled by Blue Gene, I can point to other things that make me think of myself as an admirer of IBM: leadership in Linux, leadership at the high end with Power, and the Cell architecture, to name a few. Robert.
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Niels_J=F8rgen_Kruse?= on 10 Dec 2006 16:04 Greg Lindahl <lindahl(a)pbm.com> wrote: > Note that Blue Gene's chip has 2 cpus which are similar yet don't > share cache. That's the odder one. Aa I understand it, in normal operation, the 2 cpus are used in different ways, one to handle communications and one for computation. They are identical because cut and paste is easy. -- Mvh./Regards, Niels J�rgen Kruse, Vanl�se, Denmark
From: Alex Colvin on 10 Dec 2006 16:43 >What if IBM abstracted out the SPE interface logic and management >software (once it is perfected) to allow third parties to re-use the >Cell's high-level design with different specialized SPE instruction Perhaps somebody like Xilinx, which embeds IBM PowerPC cores in its FPGAs, would offer an embedded CELL core with SPE. -- mac the na�f
From: Del Cecchi on 10 Dec 2006 17:24
"Robert Myers" <rbmyersusa(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:1165775205.069230.110970(a)73g2000cwn.googlegroups.com... > Piotr Wyderski wrote: >> Robert Myers wrote: >> >> > As we are going now, the US is aiming to be a second or third class >> > player in technology and science, and much of the negative >> > leadership >> > is coming from players who think themselves the brightest thing in >> > the >> > firmament. >> >> So simply do not buy their products and let their competitors fulfill >> your needs. If you are wrong, nobody will see the difference and >> the mistake will be your problem. If you are right, the competitors' >> income will increase, so it will become IBM's problem. >> > Your post reflects a common misunderstanding of how the US has worked > since World War II. Contrary to popular opinion, we do not have a free > market economy. We have [had] a Keynsian economy driven by military > spending, which has also driven much of science and technology. > > Blue Gene is a perfect example. It was not driven by market economics, > but by a specific need of a bomb lab. Without that customer, Blue Gene > would not exist, or certainly not at the scale and with the visibility > it has now. IBM has been reasonably shrewd in trying to leverage those > nuclear weapons dollars into other business, but that doesn't change > the reality of how the money flows. > > My criticism was not aimed at IBM. > > Robert. > Your supposition about blue gene is incorrect. I was involved somewhat at the time Blue Gene/L was getting initially started and there was nothing about bombs or national labs involved. Actually it was computational chemistry, proteins, genes, drugs, all that sort of thing. It turned out to be interesting to the bomb guys also apparently. But it was proteins first. del |