One Cell of a CPU

**stormy** · 14 Jan 2006, 03:30 AM

In related news, I was at ibm in austin today and saw the lab where they play around with the 360 dev boards. Most of them were water cooled. Had lunch with some of the engineers who worked on the proc as well. Didn't get to see the cell stuff since it's a different group, but I saw that demo the article talks about at a talk last month. Procs are sweet.

**Omni** · 14 Jan 2006, 03:41 AM

*jealous*

They keep the Cell stuff guarded away I see. Rightly so!

How'd you get to meet them?

This one's an oldie but a goodie.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...=playstation+3

**stormy** · 14 Jan 2006, 04:08 AM

Originally Posted by OmniGear

How'd you get to meet them?

Job interview. They had trays full of 360 chips laying around too. IBM gave everyone on the team a free 360. All during lunch the 3 guys i was with were talking about call of duty and need for speed. None of them were gamers before they got thier 360s, or at least not recently. Oh, and the dev boards have the same huge power brick as the normal system.

We talked a little about security, they don't think anyone will crack it before the next generation comes out. I asked if they could do it and they said MS makes sure no one person/group knows enough to crack the whole thing.

The cell stuff wasn't gaurded per se, it just wasn't thier group. I think it was in a different building or maybe just a different floor.

**Omni** · 14 Jan 2006, 04:23 AM

Originally Posted by stormy

Job interview.

Good luck, hope it went well.

Originally Posted by stormy

We talked a little about security, they don't think anyone will crack it before the next generation comes out. I asked if they could do it and they said MS makes sure no one person/group knows enough to crack the whole thing.

Well they have alot to learn from.

Did they mention how many people worked on the chip?

**stormy** · 14 Jan 2006, 05:00 AM

Originally Posted by OmniGear

Did they mention how many people worked on the chip?

Tons. They said it was the biggest project they've worked on, and it involved teams from all over the place, not just Austin. I don't remember any numbers specifically though.

I asked them about the power difference from cell. We didn't talk that long about it, but they said it'd beat cell in integer performance and obviously cell crushes it in floating point. They also talked about how challenging the programming model will be for cell and wondered how they'd take advantage of the FP performance. So they didn't really say anything new, that's all pretty standard stuff. It didn't seem to me that they felt inferior to cell in any way though, if that means anything.

The main thing they emphasize was that they had a really tight schedual, and that this project was done fast considering what they had to deliver. They were really proud of that (and trash talked intel

).

**SpoDaddy** · 14 Jan 2006, 05:14 AM

There's no way PS3 is coming out this year. We're on the verge of the next wave of 360 shipments, if PS3 was coming in 2006 Sony would be announcing it hot and heavy. I think they planned on Xbox360 tanking (which could still happen) and PSP taking the world by storm. Sony has gotten really arrogant and lazy, they're where Nintendo was ten years ago.

**Daitokuji** · 14 Jan 2006, 03:46 PM

I can't see the ps3 coming out in 07. If MS puts out enough 360s and no ps3 for another year (tho the hype for the system will be there and i'll probably get one day of) I think they marketshare would be big time in MS favor and sony probably would have to do alot of fighting.

And for that to happen the games would have to look 10 times better than the 360 games will look at the time of launch.