Cell (PS3 related) for doomies

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Missle Seeker
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Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2004 12:29 am

Cell (PS3 related) for doomies

Post by Missle Seeker »

Hi. As far as I understand (it's not far, really) many peoples already begin to think about development for PS3. If so, then some of you, noble members of ps2dev society, have seen doc's dedicated to PS3 architecture. So, my question is: what can/should I consider as CPU (as equivalent in PC-architecture) in Cell? PE? PU? APU?
(Abbreviations from description part of patent 20020138637).
Sorry for inudequate question - I'm lost in translation...yeah
Thanks in advance
mrbrown
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Post by mrbrown »

Moved to Off-Topic.
"He was warned..."
J.F.
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Post by J.F. »

As I understand it from the documents published so far, the Cell processor uses a PowerPC core to control several vector units which are similar to the vector units in the PS2.

PS2 EE: MIPS 64bit CPU -> VU0 VU1
Cell: PowerPC CPU -> 3+ VUs

The vector units in the Cell are very similar in design to the VUs in the PS2, but quite a bit more powerful. The whole thing is designed so that it is easy to scale the number of controlling cores and vector units included in the die.

Other than brief overviews of the architecture, almost nothing has been released to the public. You'd probably need to sign some heavy NDAs from Sony and/or IBM to get more detailed info on the actual programming of the Cell processor at this time.
Missle Seeker
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Joined: Thu Oct 07, 2004 12:29 am

Post by Missle Seeker »

Thank You. Your answer was very helpful.
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