Understanding the Cell Microprocessor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 17, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Usage Patterns
Before getting into the architecture of Cell, let’s talk a bit about the types of workloads for which Cell and other microprocessors are currently being built.In the past, office application performance was a driving factor behind microprocessor development. Before multitasking and before email, there was single application performance and for the most part, we were talking about office applications, word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Thus, most microprocessors were designed toward incredible single application, single task performance.
As microprocessors became more powerful, the software followed - multitasking environments were born. The vast majority of computer users, however, were still focused on single application usage, so microprocessor development continued to focus on single-threaded performance (single application, single task performance).
Over the years, the single-threaded performance demands grew. Microsoft Word was no longer the defining application, but things like games, media processing and dynamic content creation became the applications that ate up the most CPU cycles. This is where we are today with workloads being a mix of office, 3D games, 3D content creation and media encoding/decoding/transcoding that consume our CPU cycles. But in order to understand the creation of a new architecture like Cell, you have to understand where these workloads are headed. Just as the types of applications demanding performance today are much different than those run 10 years ago, the same will apply to applications in the next decade. And given that a new microprocessor architecture takes about 5 years to develop, it is feasible to introduce a new architecture geared towards these new usage models now.
Intel spoke a lot about future usage models at their most recent IDF, things like real time voice recognition (and even translation), unstructured search (e.g. Google image search), even better physics and AI models in games, more feature-rich user interfaces (e.g. hand gesture recognition), etc. These are the usage models of the future, and as such, they have a different set of demands on microprocessors and their associated architectures.
The type of performance required to enable these types of usage models is significantly higher than what we have available to us today. Conventionally, performance increases from one microprocessor generation to the next by optimizing single thread performance. There are a number of ways of improving single thread performance, either by driving up the clock speed or by increasing the instructions executed per clock (IPC). Taking it one step further, the more parallelism you can extract from a single thread, the better your performance will be - this type of parallelism is known as instruction level parallelism (ILP) as it involves executing as many instructions out of a thread at the same time.
The problem with improving performance through increasing ILP is that from one generation to the next, you’re only talking about a 10% - 20% increase in performance. Yet, the usage models that we’re talking about for the future require significantly more than the type of gains that we’ve been getting in the past. With power limitations preventing clock speeds from scaling too high, it’s clear that there needs to be another way of improving performance.
The major players in the microprocessor industry have all pretty much agreed that the only way to get the type of performance gains that are necessary is by moving towards multi-core architectures. Through a combination of multithreaded applications and multi-core processors, you can get the types of performance increases that should allow for these types of applications to be developed. Instead of focusing on extracting ILP to improve performance, these multi-core processors extract parallelism on a thread level to improve performance (thread level parallelism - TLP).
It’s not as straightforward as that, however. There are a handful of decisions that need to be made. How powerful do you make each core in your multi-core microprocessor? Do you have a small array of powerful processors or a larger array of simpler processors? How do they communicate with one another? How do you deal with feeding a multi-core processor with enough memory bandwidth?
The Cell implementation is just one solution to the problem...
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Houdani - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
I think I missed something fundamental.Can the SPEs be addressed directly by software, or do they have to be fed all of their instructions by the PPE?
If they DO have to be fed be the PPE, I fail to see how the PPE can possibly feed them enough to keep them all working concurrently.
Someone throw me a bone here.
suryad - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
I thought the G5 was a POWER5 proc. But I could of course be wrong. All I can say is the Cell definitely intriguing as it may be will have a rough road ahead of it and I am quite surprised that these large corporations invested so much in it, cutting edge though it might be. And as for the current forseeable future, I think when multi-core FX processors from AMD comes out, I do not believe there will be anything more devastating than that. Especially once they hit the 3 Ghz barrier with multi-cores enabled and faster DDR2-3 or even RAMBUS memory capabilities.tipoo - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
No, G5 was 970 based.Questar - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
#50,Yes the G5 is a POWER4 derivitive.
Since you were wrong on that, don't think that you know what is significant about the design of POWER5. There were major architechture changes made to the processor.
fitten - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
The only things new about Cell is its target market and being a single chip. The article mentions the TI DSP chip, but there were other similar architectures as well. One example that I'm familiar with is the MAP1310 board by CSPI. Back then, processes weren't good enough to put all the cores on a single chip but the basic architecture is the same - a PPC core to do the 'normal' stuff and two quad-core DSPs (SHARC) to do the 'work'. This board wasn't successful because it was considered too hard to program to get the performance it promised.... and this opinion is from people who live/breathe real-time systems and multiprocessing codes.The only thing new about Cell is that a) it's all on one chip now and b) the target market is a general marketplace and not a niche.
scrotemaninov - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
#48. OK, I was under the impression that the G5 was based on the POWER5. You're saying it's based on the POWER4 instead?And the POWER4 and POWER5 aren't really "completely different chips" in the same way that the P4 and P3 are different chips, or in the way that the P4 and the Opteron are different chips. I can give you a list of the differences if you want. Start at http://www.elet.polimi.it/upload/sami/architetture...
The POWER5 is designed to not only be completely compatible with the POWER4 but to also to support all the optimisations from the POWER4. The only things of significance they've done is a) move the L3 cache controller on chip; b) change the various branch predictors to bimodal instead of 1-bit; c) increase the associativity and size of the caches.
Anyway, this is going off topic now...
Jacmert - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
Rofl. Computer engineering and VLSI design. Gotta love those NMOS/PMOS transistor circuits.I never thought that I'd see stuff from my textbook explained on anandtech.com
saratoga - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
"#38. You're right that the G5 is a derivative of the POWER5. The POWER5 is dual core, each core with 2way SMT giving a total of 4 'visible' cpus to the OS. The G5 is simply a single core version of the same thing."Err no its not. POWER4 != POWER5. Hence the different names ;)
They're completely different chips.
"Well scrotemaninov I am not disputing that the POWER architecture by IBM is brilliantly done. IBM is definitely one of those companies churning out brilliant and elegant technology always in the background.
But my problem with the POWER technology is from what I understand very limitedly, is that the POWER processors in the Mac machines are a derivative of that architecture right? Why the heck are they so damn slow then?
I mean you can buy an AMD FX 55 based on the crappy legacy x86 arch and it smokes the dual 2.5 GHz Macs easily!! Is it cause of the OS? Because so far from what I have seen, if the Macs are any indication of the performance capabilities of the POWER architecture, the Cell will not be a big hit.
I did read though at www.aceshardware.com benchmark reviews of the POWER5 architecture with some insane number of cores if I recall correctly and the benchmarks were of the charts. They are definitely not what the Macs have installed in them..."
There are slow memeory systems and then theres the one used on the G5. I've heard that you can put 8 Opterons together and still get average access times across all 8 cores that are better then a single G5. Thats probably a good part of the reason the G5 was so much slower then many people thought it would be. The rest is mainly IBM's trouble making them, and their inability to ramp clock speed like they planned on.
scrotemaninov - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
#38. You're right that the G5 is a derivative of the POWER5. The POWER5 is dual core, each core with 2way SMT giving a total of 4 'visible' cpus to the OS. The G5 is simply a single core version of the same thing.As for the performance, Opteron is pretty much unbeatable for integer-bound applications. Itanium2 is unbeatable for FP applications. POWER5 is somewhere in the middle.
Most desktop applications are going to be integer bound. So it's not at all surprising that you find the G5 'slow' in that respect in comparison to the FX55. Plus, and this is the whole problem with the CELL, there's no point putting dual CPUs in there unless you can utilise them properly. If you have one process going flat out trying to run a heavy application and it's single threaded then you're only using about 1/4 of the CPUs you've bought for that application (for a dual G5 2.5), whereas the Opterons and FX55 stuff is more designed around quick, single threaded applications.
dmens - Friday, March 18, 2005 - link
psuedo-pmos wtf? That's domino logic, it's been around forever, and it's definitely not efficient in terms of power. Oh, and it takes forever to verify timing.