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Cell Software Development
Software development for the Cell microprocessor involves a mixture of conventional development practices for the PowerPC-compatible PPU core, and novel software development challenges with regard to the functionally reduced SPU coprocessors. Linux on Cell An open source software-based strategy was adopted to accelerate the development of a Cell BE ecosystem and to provide an environment to develop Cell applications, including a GCC-based Cell compiler, binutils and a port of the Linux operating system. Octopiler Octopiler is IBM's prototype compiler to allow software developers to write software code, code for Cell processors. Software portability Adapting VMX for SPU Differences between VMX and SPU The AltiVec, VMX (Vector Multimedia Extensions) technology is conceptually similar to the vector model provided by the SPU processors, but there are many significant differences. The VMX ''Java (programming language), Java mode'' conforms to the Java Language Specification 1 subse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cell Microprocessor
The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) is a 64-bit multi-core processor and microarchitecture developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM—an alliance known as "STI". It combines a general-purpose PowerPC core, called the Power Processing Element (PPE), with multiple specialized coprocessors, known as Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs), which accelerate tasks such as multimedia and vector processing. The architecture was developed over a four-year period beginning in March 2001, with Sony reporting a development budget of approximately . Its first major commercial application was in Sony's PlayStation 3 home video game console, released in 2006. In 2008, a modified version of the Cell processor powered IBM's Roadrunner, the first supercomputer to sustain one petaFLOPS. Other applications include high-performance computing systems from Mercury Computer Systems and specialized arcade system boards. Cell emphasizes memory coherence, power efficiency, and peak computational throug ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
