Cell microprocessor implementations: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:25, 5 August 2018

Revision as of 14:23, 25 January 2020

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The first commercial [[Cell microprocessor]], the Cell BE, was designed for the Sony PlayStation 3.

IBM designed the PowerXCell 8i for use in the [[Roadrunner supercomputer]].<ref>

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! Designation || Die Area || First Disclosed || Enhancement

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| DD1 || 221&nbsp;mm²² || ISSCC 2005 ||

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| DD2 || 235&nbsp;mm²² || Cool Chips April 2005 || enhanced PPE core

|}

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====Cell at 65 nm====

The first shrink of Cell was at the 65&nbsp;nm node. The reduction to 65&nbsp;nm reduced the existing 230&nbsp;mm²² die based on the 90&nbsp;nm process to half its current size, about 120&nbsp;mm²², greatly reducing IBM's manufacturing cost as well.

On 12 March 2007, IBM announced that it started producing 65&nbsp;nm Cells in its East Fishkill fab. The chips produced there are apparently only for IBMs own Cell [[Computing blade|blade]] servers, which were the first to get the 65&nbsp;nm Cells. Sony introduced the third generation of the PS3 in November 2007, the 40GB model without PS2-compatibility which was [https://www.engadget.com/2007/10/30/40gb-ps3-features-65nm-chips-lower-power-consumption/ confirmed] to use the 65&nbsp;nm Cell. Thanks to the shrunk Cell, power consumption was reduced from 200W to 135W.

At first it was only known that the 65&nbsp;nm-Cells clock up to 6&nbsp;GHz and run on 1.3V core voltage, as [http://news.spong.com/article/11413?cb=936 demonstrated] on the [[ISSCC]] 2007. This would have given the chip a theoretical peak performance of 384 GFLOPS in FP8 quarter precision (48 GFLOPs in FP64 dual precision), a significant improvement to the 204.8 GFLOPS peak (25.6GFLOPs FP64 dual precision) that a 90&nbsp;nm 3.2&nbsp;GHz Cell could provide with 8 active SPUs. IBM further announced it implemented new power-saving features and a dual power supply for the SRAM array. This version was not yet the long-rumoured "Cell+" with enhanced Double Precision floating point performance, which first saw the light of day mid-2008 in the [[IBM Roadrunner|Roadrunner supercomputer]] in the form of [[QS22#Cell based Blades|QS22]] PowerXCell blades. Although IBM talked about and even showed higher-clocked Cells before, clock speed has remained constant at 3.2&nbsp;GHz, even for the double precision enabled "Cell+" of the Roadrunner. By keeping clockspeed constant, IBM has instead opted to reduce power consumption. PowerXCell clusters even best IBMs [[Blue Gene]] clusters (371 MFLOPS/Watt), which are far more power-efficient already than clusters made up of conventional CPUs (265 MFLOPS/Watt and lower).

===Future editions in CMOS===