[mythtv-users] "Cell Microprocessor Simultaneously Decoding 48 MPEG-2 Streams"

Robert Johnston anaerin at gmail.com
Mon May 2 18:32:14 UTC 2005


On 5/2/05, Stef Coene <stef.coene at docum.org> wrote:
> On Monday 02 May 2005 19:53, Devan Lippman wrote:
> > I hope I can get one of these as the CPU for my machine!  Been a while
> > since I read that explination but I think that its a series of power
> > CPUs arranged similar to a beowulf cluster all on one chip which means
> > it shouldn't be too far off from existing CPUs that linux will run on
> > in the final presentation to the system.
> Mhh, 1 cell = 1 stripped down cpu (based on a Power PC) + 8 SPE's.  The CPU is
> stripped from all extra logic.  It will _not_ run power pc binary's.  (I'm
> not a cpu specialist, but there is for instance no memory protection.)
> 
> The real power are the 8 SPE's.  You can stream data from SPE to SPE.  So it's
> perfect for decoding / encoding data streams.  1 SPE can filter the input,
> another color adjustment, 2 others can do the encoding and so on.
> 
> An other interesing stuff is the fact you have hardware cells (1 CPU + 8
> SPE's) and software cells.  The software cell can use 1 or more hardware
> cells to do the job (in the PS3 there are 4 hardware cells).  Combined with
> the fact that hardware cells can find each other when they are connected, you
> can use the cell in your printer to help encoding mpeg2 streams in your myth
> box.  Actually, you don't have to do anything, the cell in the mythtv bow
> will use the cell in the printer if it need so.
> 
> Just do me a favor, and read the papers yourself :)  It's a long time I read
> them and they are really interesting.

Sounds to me like a hardware version of the "Grid" style of QNX, where
all networked QNX machines pool their CPU and resources to handle all
requests across the network (So, say, a single webserver can use other
machines on the network to handle the "Slashdot effect").

Oh, but QNX runs with x86's
-- 
Robert "Anaerin" Johnston


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