E3 2005: Cell Processor Technology Demos
IBM takes a through a series of demos highlighting the Cell's processing prowess.
May 17, 2005 - As part of its technical showings at E3 2005, IBM set up a demo event showcasing the Cell processor. Created by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, the Cell processor will be the heart of Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3, officially unveiled yesterday at its press conference.
IBM's presentation consisted of a set of computationally-intensive demos, intended to show off the number-crunching power of the Cell's individual processing units. Each Cell processor is made up of one ***** Processing Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The PPE is in charge of feeding instructions to the eight SPEs, which are capable of working individually on tasks without the need to reference the other SPEs. In short, a single Cell processor is capable of running eight separate tasks simultaneously at its full operational speed (3.2GHz in the case of the demoed CPUs), plus whatever you can throw at the PPE.
The first demo we saw was a ray-traced landscape demo, which was also shown at Sony's PlayStation 3 press conference yesterday. Height field data acquired by LIDAR (light RADAR basically) was combined with a color overlay taken via satellite imagery to create a realistic 3D rendering of the Mount St. Helens volcanic area.
The key to this demo was that the imagery was ray-traced in realtime solely via a pair of Cell processors. Instead of using a video card to display the graphics (thereby limiting the "wow" factor), the Cell processors rendered the image to a series of JPG images, which were then streamed to a standard G5 tower over the network. Each image was rendered at 1280x720, creating a 720p high-definition scene of the area.
A switch allowed for turning on colored stripes that represented what each SPE was rendering at any given moment, updated in realtime. As more complex areas entered the view, the SPEs would dynamically scale how much of the scene they were rendering so that the framerate stayed even (and solid) throughout the demo.
The next demo was based on a new cloth simulation algorithm being worked into Maya. Again using two Cell processors, the demo was able to run 16 separate simulations simultaneously. Each piece of cloth was defined by 300 vertices, but the real kicker with this demo is that the algorithm incorporated self-intersecting physics, keeping the cloth from flowing through itself. This sort of simulation is much more computationally-intensive than simulating a cloth against another object.
Next up we checked out a set of blade servers, each set up with two Cell processors. They weren't final design quite yet, but when finished they'll sport a double-width size while still being able to keep the processors quite cool. In fact, as the blades were open we could test the heat coming off of them and it felt reasonably cool, cooler than many of our high-end PCs back at the IGN offices. This bodes well for heat-issues, or more correctly the lack thereof.
Lastly, we saw a demo of a network game with entirely server-side physics. The goal here was to prove that a high-end server could run some of the most computationally-intensive parts of a game, saving the client machines from having to process what would wind up being redundant data. The demo featured some huge mechs, large buildings and a couple tanks. As parts of an object were fired upon, pieces of it would crumble off and collide and bounce with surrounding objects. While it honestly wasn't the most impressive piece of physics tech we've ever seen, the fact that it was all running server-side was kinda neat.
That ended our demo time with the Cell processor. While a couple of the demos were quite impressive, like the cloth and landscape demos, the coolest part was actually seeing Cell processors up and running right in front of us. Sure, we saw the same thing yesterday at the Sony press conference, but in those cases the hardware was hidden. It's reassuring to actually see the processors cranking out data right in front of our eyes.
-- Chris Roper
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