Cell is no longer HPC material

comp_ali · Nov 29, 2009, 09:24 AM

AS THE NEWS BROKE at Heise.de, you could almost feel the Cell collective - that is, the Sony PS3 developer community and gamers - reel in shock at the sharp, jagged bits of an interview with IBM's Deep Computing VP, David Turek, saying Cell was to be no more. Of course, since he is the VP of HPC at IBM he was just talking about HPC rather than everything else.

According to the IBM executive's crystal ball, Cell is now no longer the right platform on which to develop HPC computing and so IBM will be shifting its focus from Cell-based co-processing to OpenCL-based co-processing - AMD's GPU stuff, in not so many words. This means that while Cell served its purpose in proving parallel processing was the way to go, development costs of further Cell based products become pointless as GPGPU computing becomes more widespread. Considering AMD is one of IBM's closest research partners this hardly comes as a surprise.
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source : The Inquirer

Nov 29, 2009, 09:24 AM	#1
comp_ali Sniper Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Egypt Posts: 5,539 Rep Power: 152 System Specs	Cell is no longer HPC material AS THE NEWS BROKE at Heise.de, you could almost feel the Cell collective - that is, the Sony PS3 developer community and gamers - reel in shock at the sharp, jagged bits of an interview with IBM's Deep Computing VP, David Turek, saying Cell was to be no more. Of course, since he is the VP of HPC at IBM he was just talking about HPC rather than everything else. According to the IBM executive's crystal ball, Cell is now no longer the right platform on which to develop HPC computing and so IBM will be shifting its focus from Cell-based co-processing to OpenCL-based co-processing - AMD's GPU stuff, in not so many words. This means that while Cell served its purpose in proving parallel processing was the way to go, development costs of further Cell based products become pointless as GPGPU computing becomes more widespread. Considering AMD is one of IBM's closest research partners this hardly comes as a surprise. ________ source : The Inquirer