[Luk07]

I am sure you have all heard of the great Ps3 Cell processor but do you know whether it will become available for desktop pc's by 2007 or something? also what are teraflops? (the Cell processor has the power of 2 teraflops)

 

[Resolution]

I am sure you have all heard of the great Ps3 Cell processor but do you know whether it will become available for desktop pc's by 2007 or something?

Last I heard it was 2006, but I wouldn't count on it. Proposed dates change all the time in the computer industry.

also what are teraflops?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=teraflop&btnG=Google+Search

 

[Luk07]

so umm...what exactly are floating point operations? lol

 

[Resolution]

Any mathematical operation that involves numbers with decimals.

 

[Luk07]

so what speed (in those terms) does say an athlon 64 3000+ run at at?

 

[Resolution]

http://www.buildorbuy.org/athlon64chart.html

 

[Luk07]

that doesnt tell me how many floating point operations it can do second though

 

[koala]

From geek.com
"The actual core processing in the AMD64 speed is actually about the same or slightly slower per clock cycle than that of the AthlonXP, this is primarily because of the longer 17stage floating-point pipeline. However the larger cache and the faster memory interface make up for this in most situations, also the AMD64s longer pipelining will help the AMD64 run with a faster clock hopefully than the AthlonXP, but this is not 100% because the AMD64 produces more heat than the AthlonXP."

Floating point scores http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=printpage&artid=63 (3rd graph)

 

[Luk07]

so im looking at the Athlon 64 3000+ score and it says 3016 but it also says mbs/sec at the bottom does that mean i have to times it by a million to get the equivalent measurement to the cell processor? e.g. 3,016,000,000 floating point operations per second?

 

[Resolution]

Do you have a specific question in mind? You already said that you don't understand the terminology so it kind of feels like you are stringing us along...

 

[Luk07]

lol, there was no real intension, right now i just wanna find out how my athlon 64 compares to a Cell processor in the way of floating point operations. So i can get a scale of how good the cell processor compared to a standard desktop CPU

 

[Barry_R]

Cell processors are a whole different animal from what we have today. I do not think you can use clock speed to accurately compare the current CPUs to a Cell Processor.

The Cell Processor is made up of multiple CPU's. There is the primary processing unit (PPU) that distributes tasks and there are multiple secondary processing units (SPU's) which carry out the tasks.

To complicate the matter even further it is possible to assign other Cell Processors tasks so now we have multiple PPU/SPU systems working together.

If the Cell Processor becomes reality (I think it will in some form) it will leave todays CPU's in the dust by a large margin.

 

[Luk07]

so how many secondry CPU's do you think the ps3 has? just a curious question. oh and cheers for that post! very informative!

 

[Barry_R]

I do not know how many secondary CPU's they will have. The discussion I read from the Toshiba company showed a diagram of the proposed architecture which had 1 PPU and 6 SPU's.

It's gonna be a while before this technology becomes main stream. Standards have to be established, software has to be written, etc.

 

[Luk07]

cheers once again! why is everyone so smart/well informed on TSF? it is called GOOGLE!!! lol

but, seriously cheers now i know this (in retrospect) useless piece of information i can rule the world! mwuahahahahahaa!!!

lmao, why not?