The ZEGO ("Zest to go") is a

rackmount A 19-inch rack is a standardized frame or enclosure for mounting multiple electronic equipment modules. Each module has a front panel that is wide. The 19 inch dimension includes the edges or "ears" that protrude from each side of the equ ...

server platform built by

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

, targeted for the video

post-production Post-production is part of the process of filmmaking, video production, audio production, and photography. Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording individual program segments. Th ...

and

broadcast Broadcasting is the distribution (business), distribution of sound, audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic medium (communication), mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum (radio ...

markets. The platform is based on Sony's

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

as it features both the

Cell Processor Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as ...

as well as the

RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is a proprietary graphics processing unit (GPU) codeveloped by Nvidia and Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console. It is a GPU based on the Nvidia 7800GTX graphics processor and, according to Nvidia, is a G ...

. It is aimed to greatly speed up postproduction work (in particular in the computationally extremely taxing

4K resolution 4K resolution refers to a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. Digital television and digital cinematography commonly use several different 4K resolutions. In television and consumer media, 38402160 (4K UHD) is the domina ...

3D rendering 3D rendering is the 3D computer graphics process of converting 3D models into 2D images on a computer. 3D renders may include photorealistic effects or non-photorealistic styles. Rendering methods Rendering is the final process of creati ...

and

video processing In electronics engineering, video processing is a particular case of signal processing, in particular image processing, which often employs video filters and where the input and output signals are video files or video streams. Video processing t ...

. In some respects it is rather similar to IBM's QS20/21/22 blades (such as used in the

Roadrunner The roadrunners (genus ''Geococcyx''), also known as chaparral birds or chaparral cocks, are two species of fast-running ground cuckoos with long tails and crests. They are found in the southwestern and south-central United States and Mexico, u ...

supercomputer that took the top spot in the

Top500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinc ...

in May 2008), although Sony seems to target the DCC (

Digital Content Creation Content creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts. Content is "something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of ...

) markets rather than scientific like IBM, which can be seen by the inclusion of the RSX graphics processor in the ZEGO platform. ZEGO runs Fixstars's Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux, which was also Sony's favourite Linux distribution for the PlayStation 3.

Architecture

The architecture is not identical to the PlayStation 3. One difference is that the BCU-100 has 1 GB XDR

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch ...

instead of the PlayStation 3's 256 MB.

Video RAM Dual-ported video RAM, or VRAM, is a dual-ported variant of dynamic RAM (DRAM), which was once commonly used to store the framebuffer in graphics adapters. Note that most computers and game consoles do not use this form of memory, and dual-por ...

is missing in Sony's system diagrams, but it is listed as 256 MB (like the PlayStation 3) further down in the tech specs. The XDR memory is shared by both the Cell and RSX. Sony uses the SCC (Super Companion Chip) to handle I/O tasks ( HDD,

USB 2.0 Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...

and other unspecified I/O); the SCC has its own dedicated memory of 1GB

DDR2 DDR2 or DDRII may refer to: * DDR2 SDRAM, the computer memory technology * '' Dance Dance Revolution 2ndMix'', a 1999 video game * '' Dance Dance Revolution II'', a 2011 video game * DDR2 (gene) Discoidin domain-containing receptor 2, also known as ...

as well as a Memory Extension Adapter connected via

PCI Express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common m ...

that can hold up to 8 GB. Another option for the single PCI express slot is a Video Display Board with a

DVI-I Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a comp ...

output. Further, the Cell in the BCU-100 offers the full 8 SPUs that Cell is manufactured with, as opposed to the 6 SPUs available in the PlayStation 3, which has one SPU disabled to improve manufacturing yields and one reserved for the system. This gives the BCU-100 an extra 33% potential CPU-power (or 51.2

GFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

more).

History

Sony presented its first ZEGO product, the BCU-100, to the public at

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

2008 in mid-August. Sony plans to ship the BCU-100 by the end of 2008 and deliver it with the Mental Ray raytracer by Mental Images to speed up 3D rendering tasks and

Houdini Harry Houdini (, born Erik Weisz; March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was a Hungarian-American escape artist, magic man, and stunt performer, noted for his escape acts. His pseudonym is a reference to his spiritual master, French magician ...

Batch by Side Effects Software. The company claims to be in talk with other software makers in the DCC field to port and optimize their software for the ZEGO platform. ZEGO is similar to a workstation based on the PlayStation 2 architecture called the

GScube The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October 2000, in Europe on 24 November 2000, and in Australia on 3 ...

, which was also shown at Siggraph in the year 2000, and which, although used for

visualization Visualization or visualisation may refer to: * Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message * Data visualization, the graphic representation of data * Information visualiz ...

in a few movie projects, ultimately failed in the market. However, while the GScube only targeted realtime visualization in 1080p HD, ZEGOs target markets are much broader, encompassing for example

physics simulation Dynamical simulation, in computational physics, is the simulation of systems of objects that are free to move, usually in three dimensions according to Newton's laws of dynamics, or approximations thereof. Dynamical simulation is used in computer ...

, final 3D rendering and video processing as well as visualization. It remains to be seen if ZEGO actually manages what the GScube was unable to do. It is worth noting that the massively parallel design of the GScube, being not much more than 16

Graphics Synthesizer The PlayStation 2 technical specifications describe the various components of the PlayStation 2 (PS2) video game console. Overview The sixth-generation hardware of the PlayStation 2 video game console consists of various components. At th ...

chips with dedicated RAM,Wired article on GScube
/ref> inspired the design of the Cell processor itself with its 8 SPUs with dedicated RAM. As of August 2009 the device appears to have been discontinued. Searches on Sony.com and pro.sony.com for either Zego or BCU-100 return nothing but the year-old press release claiming the product would ship within a few months.

Technical specifications

BCU-100

* 1U rackmount unit * 3.2 GHz Cell/B.E. CPU * RSX (connected to Cell via a 20 GByte/s up- and 15 Gbyte/s downstream link) * SCC (connected to Cell via a 5 GByte/s link) * 1GB XDR RAM with ECC (Cell and RSX, 25,6 GByte/s Bandwidth) * 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (SCC) * 2x Gigabit Ethernet * 3x USB 2.0 * 1x PCI Express 4-lane (hosts either the Memory Extension Adapter or the Video Display Board) * 160 GB 3.5"

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host adapter, host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) ...

harddrive * <330

Watt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James Wa ...

s power consumption * optional BDCU-EX1 Memory Extension Adapter with 8GB RAM * optional BKCU-VD1 Video Display Board with DVI-I (for using the BCU-100 as a Workstation)

References

External links

Sony Press release for the Siggraph 2008 presentation featuring a video

ZEGO page at Sony.com

Sony BCU-100 Brochure

Sony presents ZEGO at Siggraph 2008

Terra Soft solutions' page for ZEGO

Side Effects and Sony develop Cell-based solution
{{Cell microprocessor segments Cell BE architecture Server hardware Sony hardware Ultra-high-definition television