It would require a compiler that takes advantage of the SPE units to run well. IBM has >one (no idea about the cost) used for professional development. It is not a simple chip >to program for and without extensive work done on parallel processing it doesn't perform >up to potential. Once that work is done on the software it should outmatch any PC >hardware.

-In HPC-circles (the people with the largest computing iron...), the Cell processor has stirred quite some emotions. The relatively unknown Mercury Computer works with IBM: http://www.mc.com/cell/products/view/index.cfm?id=5&type=Software

When the Cell is able to produce 64bit double precison floats it's very likely that'll it replace a lot of big iron. IBM has included it in its proposal for this coming round of DARPA HPC competition.

AvS

Thanks, that seems to answer the question... If there is no full access to the hardware it will not be possible to use the advantages of the fast chip. so no Pd as a superfast ps3-game. although pd might already run with limitations of speed an features. marius.

Frank Barknecht wrote:

Hallo, marius schebella hat gesagt: // marius schebella wrote:

...

is someone of you planning to use Pd on a playstation 3? would that be a good hardware choice for bare-pd systems?

http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/manual.html

German heise-News: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/81254

Seems there is no support for accessing accelerated graphics card, so no OpenGL. :(

Anyway, there are no PS3s to buy ATM anyway.

Ciao

it would be more complicated to do it right than just recompiling the vanilla sources.

-There is a huge amount of information available on this place: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

AvS

On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 12:06:03AM +0100, Cyrille.Damez@laposte.net wrote:

Le Dimanche 19 Novembre 2006 15:20, marius schebella a écrit :

...

Thanks, that seems to answer the question... If there is no full access to the hardware it will not be possible to use the advantages of the fast chip. so no Pd as a superfast ps3-game. although pd might already run with limitations of speed an features. marius.

What's interesting (for us pd users) in the PS3 is more the 7 SPEs (the cell's coprocessors) than the graphics card, unless you wanted to use GEM. This thing has massive floating point processing power. As far as I know, the Yellow Dog-based PS3 Linux distro will ship with gcc for the main CPU and for the SPEs, so porting pd on it would make a lot of sense, but it would be more complicated to do it right than just recompiling the vanilla sources.

I wonder if it would be possible to compile PDa to run inside each of the 7 SPEs and a main Pd to control them from the main CPU. That would be some pretty huge parallel DSP action.

Best,

Chris.

chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx

On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 08:45:19PM +0100, Cyrille.Damez@laposte.net wrote:

Le Mardi 21 Novembre 2006 04:43, Chris McCormick a écrit :

...

I wonder if it would be possible to compile PDa to run inside each of the 7 SPEs and a main Pd to control them from the main CPU.

I doubt it. I haven't really looked at PDa, but I suspect it is still too big to fit in a SPE local memory (256Kb code+data). Moreover, the SPEs are stream processors: you can't just throw at them code written for a general purpose cpu and expect them to run it efficiently.

So probably better for something like running individual externals (or a couple) than running a whole copy of Pd. As someone said, Pd's architecture might need a little bit of help to utilise that facility then.

Chris.

chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx

On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 07:22:17PM -0800, Danks, Mark wrote:

On a random note, I actually got PD and GEM running on a PS2 a few years ago...it is possible.

That's awesome. Was that on Linux for PS2? Is there an OpenGL wrapper on that system, or does it do that natively? I am thinking about buying a PS2 and porting ergates to it for kicks.

Chris.

chris@mccormick.cx http://mccormick.cx

On Nov 20, 2006, at 10:43 PM, Chris McCormick wrote:

On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 12:06:03AM +0100, Cyrille.Damez@laposte.net
wrote:

...

Le Dimanche 19 Novembre 2006 15:20, marius schebella a écrit :

...

Thanks, that seems to answer the question... If there is no full access
to the hardware it will not be possible to use the advantages of the
fast chip. so no Pd as a superfast ps3-game. although pd might already run with limitations of speed an features. marius.

What's interesting (for us pd users) in the PS3 is more the 7 SPEs
(the cell's coprocessors) than the graphics card, unless you wanted to use
GEM. This thing has massive floating point processing power. As far as I know, the Yellow Dog-based PS3 Linux distro will ship
with gcc for the main CPU and for the SPEs, so porting pd on it would make a
lot of sense, but it would be more complicated to do it right than just
recompiling the vanilla sources.

I wonder if it would be possible to compile PDa to run inside each of the 7 SPEs and a main Pd to control them from the main CPU. That would be some pretty huge parallel DSP action.

PDa is meant for integer-only processors, it looks like the SPEs are
floating point DSPs, so plain Pd would probably be more appropriate.

.hc

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to
realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either
change them, or perish. -William Carlos Williams