Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and the Cell Processor Dr. Hayden So Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 3 Sep, 2008
Dec 18, 2015
Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and the Cell Processor
Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and the Cell Processor
Dr. Hayden SoDepartment of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering3 Sep, 2008
The “How Things Work” Series
7 sessions of electronics gadgets and food• PS3, Robots, RFID, iPhone 3G, Green Energy Toys,
HDTV, Blu-ray devices Know how things around us work..
… and … Know how YOU can design them one day. Goal:
Sony PLAYSTATION 3 – Beyond a Game Console
OpenDevelopment
Platform
Gaming
DistributedScientific
Computing
SuperComputerCluster
Cell Processor
Co-developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM 9 Processor Cores in a chip
• 1 Power Processor Element (PPE) – 64-bit PowerPC two-way multithreaded processor @3.2GHz
• 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) – 128-bit SIMD RISC processors
• Only 7 out of the 8 SPE are being used An enhanced version, PowerXCell 8i, is
used to power the world fastest super computer
Most powerful processor among PS3,Xbox 360 and Wii(Warning: personal bias)
Folding@home
To study the process of protein folding using computers all around the world. • Works on PCs and PS3s around the world• To better understand diseases such as BSE
(Mad Cow), Alzheimer's, Huntington's Need massive computing power:
• about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second) of protein folding
• 30 CPU years for 1 protein fold In Sept, 2007, awarded Guinness World
Records as the “most powerful distributed computing network.”• > 1 petaFLOPS
Image courtesy of Folding@home
Where do we go from here…?
If you are interested in… Technical Areas EEE Program
•Knowing more about the design of the Cell Processor
•How does the whole system is designed?
•What about memory? How much? XDR? QDR? DDR?
•Graphics? Why is graphics handled by RSX but not Cell?
•Computer Architecture•Embedded System•Parallel Processing•System Design
•Computer Engineering (CE)
•Electronics and Communication Engineering (EComE)
•Why only 7 SPEs are used?•How to make XDR memory?•How to manufacture all the fancy ICs on the PS3?
•Circuit Design•VLSI Design•VLSI Manufacturing
•Electronics and Communication Engineering (EComE)
•How to manage the massive amount of data collected in Folding@home?
•How to deal with Internet scale programming?
•Information System•Network Programming
•Information Engineering (InfoE)