nek said:
Its much faster than a G5. Where did you find the 256 gigaflops number? Based on a news release in November, IBM stated: "The companies expect that a one rack Cell processor-based workstation will reach a performance of 16 teraflops or trillions of floating point calculations per second."
I expect that IBM will be using this in their future cluster supercomputers. I don't think that Apple will use the Cell, but they will use the PowerPC core from it, and they will likely benefit from the rest of the design.
It's in the News.com article:
PlayStation 3 chip has split personality
Cell can process 256 billion calculations per second (256 gigaflops), falling a wee bit short of marketing hyperbole calling it a "supercomputer on a chip." The slowest machine on the current list of the Top 500 supercomputers can do 851 gigaflops.
Where does IBM get the 16 teraflops figure? "The companies expect that a
one rack Cell processor-based workstation will reach a performance of 16 teraflops or trillions of floating point calculations per second."
The biggest standard-sized rack you can get is 48U or enough to stack 48 XServes on top of each other.
48 * 256 gigaflops = 12,288 gigaflops or about 12 teraflops.
Or if you had a dual processor Cell server, you would have
48 * 2 * 256 gigaflops = 24,476 gigaflops or 24 teraflops
But you have racks that are 24U, 25U, 40U, etc. Apple uses a 42U rack on its Xserve page. So IBM could have used whatever size rack to come up with the 16 teraflops number, but here's the money line:
A single rack of Cell-powered single processor 1U servers would theoretically have the same processing power as the hundreds of Xserves that make up System X at Virginia Tech.
Also, there is no way Apple can "use the PowerPC core from [the Cell]."
The PPC core is
integral to the Cell's design. It is not "separate" from the Cell, as seems to be the misconception that several people have stated in this thread. You might as well say that Apple can use the PowerPC core from the G5 and strip off the Altivec unit (which is not an option when ordering G5s from IBM).
Again: the Cell is 1 PowerPC core + 8 SPE ("Altivec-like") cores. These 9 cores make up
one chip that is called the Cell. The PPC core by itself is useless for Apple's purposes - you wouldn't have an FPU nor Altivec. The last time we saw a chip without an FPU was, hmmm, the Motorola 68000 or the Intel 286. If Apple uses the Cell, it needs to commit to the entire chip.