Scale, language, and perceptional change

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makes perfect sense

"From a hardware perspective IBM's cell processor represents the next evolutionary step because it takes most of the physical distance, and thus wiring and signalling time, out of the grid "

However the solution offered by the cell is not the magic bullet that will solve the problem entirely. The cell still accesses the same memory and the memory cannot serve more than one core at any given time (which means another core could be waiting to be serviced if it needs to access memory).

Secondly what happens about a value that is changed. Now you have the CACHE CONCURRENCY PROBLEM (meaning if a core changes a value that value needs to be updated in the memory and also if each core has different cache's then their caches needs to be updated with the value).

Amdhals law makes an excellent reference here.
Amdhals law states that to improve the performance of a system can have the best effect if the slowest part of the system is improved.
In laymans terms - Improving the fast component of a system though good, it wont give you the most performance gains. Improving the slowest component will give you the most performance gain.


It does not make sense to have a cell processor approach to do general computing. It only makes sense for scientific oomputing.




For general computing it makes more sense to have a much larger cache. Consider the scenario, having a cache thats in the GIGA byte range and running as fast as the processor. Now the entire application and most data would fit into the cache. The processor generally does not have to wait for memory.
So Microsoft approach to the problems its attempting to solve, their solutions make perfect sense.

Scientific computing, the cell processor makes perfect sense.

However saying the cell is the ultimate processor for every need, deoesnt make any sense.

Posted by: zzz1234567890   Posted on: 01/29/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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