Mercury intros Cell accelerator board for PC workstations

Boston (MA) - If you are attracted by the processing power of the Cell processor, but don't want to give up your existing PC environment or invest in a completely new workstation environment, Mercury may have a solution for you: The company offers a PCI express accelerator board with Cell processor that promises a whopping 180 GFlops performance boost.

[achira]

thats power, cell will come in our houses, i cant wait !

[Watapata]

maybe a ways in the future, but not any time soon unfortunately...

[CAPS LOCK]

sony can make alot of money out of this, they could probably challenge intel or amd, although i doubt it. they would probably join one of the companies...they are getting alot of intrest from their chip. i wonder why...

[Watapata]

The cell won't be able to break into the consumer market outside of the PS3 until after they are able to significantly lower manufacturing costs. With this expansion card currently running at $8000 nothing like this will make it into even high end PC's in quite a while.Not that that price has anything to do with Sony however...I find it hard to believe that Mercury can justify such a high cost as clearly Cell doesn't cost nearly that much to manufacture

[Gh0stDrag0n]

Looks like the Cell would be put to better use in the scientific community, SETI or something besides a game console.

[Watapata]

This article provides no evidence to support that statement...

[Gh0stDrag0n]

You do not play games on WORKSTATIONS

[Watapata]

Very true, however, this article says nothing about gaming applications of the Cell. It simply states that the scientific community can make use of the cell. That does not at all imply that its better for the scientific community than a game console.

[riot9]

The article lists the clock speed of these Cell processors as 2.8 ghz. That is the same speed as the what most say the PS3 devkits run at. It's also been widely speculated that the PS3 will actually run at 2.8ghz instead of 3.2 because of low chip yield. I'm not trying to attack the PS3, just pointing out something I found interesting.

[Watapata]

The article also lists final product for this card at 3.2 Ghz. perfectly in line with what Sony has stated the PS3 will run at

[Gh0stDrag0n]

Trust me Sony will not be putting the best chips in a $600 game console, when stuff like this will sell for $6000+. All Sony has to do is put a "*" by the cell's spec on the PS3 box, and somewhere in really fine print put "* up to" Then they could put the slower chips in and noboby would know any better. It's not like there will be any way to test it.

[Watapata]

They aren't going to put in a variety of different frequency chips, to suggest otherwise is idiocy. Whatever they go with, it will be one frequency. I hope you honestly don't believe that it costs over $6000 for a single 3.2 Ghz. cell processor. The fact of the matter is that these add on cards are always expensive and never aimed at consumer use. In addition they don't simply throw a cell processor onto the card and stick the card on the computer, it doesn't work that way. Complex circuitry is needed to interface everything properly. Spend 10 minutes in any hardware engineering course and you can figure that much out. In addition, there is most definitely a way to test the clock speed which can be done by using an oscilloscope to test the clock on the processor. Believe me, if Sony lowered the clock speed without telling anyone, the true speed would come out shortly after by someone ambitious enough to test the clock frequency. As of yet there has been nothing other than unsubstantiated rumor that Sony would drop the clock frequency, so until there is more, please give this a rest for all our sakes.

[DG]

See thats how you calm down fanboys. With intelligence.

[Gh0stDrag0n]

So the PS3 doesn't have "complex circuitry"? And where would you hook an oscilloscope to your PS3's cell to test the frequency? Like everyone has one of those sitting around anyway. I think the higher clocked cell's are worth alot more due to the poor yeild. Not $6000, but you can bet they will be going into higher priced products. And if production has started on the PS3, WHY do we not have final specs?
One more thing, Every processor runs within a frequency range. If you ever tested a group of "the same" processors you would know that.

[Watapata]

The PS3 does have complex circuitry, I never claimed it didn't. However we aren't referring to the entire PS3 here are we, we're referring to the Cell processor within it, a good chunk of complex circuitry all its own. In addition we are referring to different uses here as well. We're talking about a CAB card for workstations that will never touch a consumer PC unless said consumer has way too much money on their hands. The complex circuitry I'm referring to is circuitry that will allow the x86 architecture to talk to the Cell processor. It isn't so cut and dry as to simply connect the pins on the Cell to the pins in the PCI-express slot. In addition to what the company has to charge for this extra circuitry on top of the cell processor, they need to charge an extra, significant, amount for research and development time. A company such as Sony can recoup this cost easily because their product is intended for mass market, but this CAB card will never be made available for the mass market, only for the select few workstations that need it. I also never said that testing the frequency would be for the light hearted, but you can rest assured that someone will do it either way. People regularly buy these machines for the explicit purpose of taking them apart and analyzing them. Run a search and there's plenty of pics of 360's, Xbox's, and PS2's that people have taken apart to analyze. It is not necessarily a simple task to test the clock speed, though it can be made to be much more simple if you know what you are doing. Not everyone has an oscilloscope sitting around, but thats not the point. Its idiocy to think that Sony would put in Cells with a variety of clock frequencies as it would be obvious to everyone the moment they picked theirs up and it didn't perform up to par with a friend's. It just won't happen. I never mentioned production on the PS3, but you can be certain that there is no need for Sony to announce the final specs, especially if the specs have not changed from those most recently announced. There's rumors that Nintendo may never release their specs, why have you not jumped all over that? Frankly, its not necessary for them to do so until they feel its time.I know quite well that every processor runs within a specific range, but the leeway is typically extremely small. The processors that they test that don't match the frequency spec'ed out will be placed aside for use in other products. That is more than common knowledge in the computer industry, and for the most part outside of it as well...

[DC RID3R]

the nvidia gpu is the ps3's LAST HOPE!!

[tk]

Something has been bugging me for quite some time now. It seems asif there is an army of XB360 fb's out there waiting for any PS3 / Cell / BluRay news to come out and post seemingly "negative" comments. For instance - the Cell CPU and its potential scientific use. Why would any gamer - except maybe for PS3 fans be interested in it? It is clear that every key technological part of the PS3 is a target for typical FUD. "It is cr@p at general code". "It is not good for AI". I mean, if the scientific community and medical imaging folks are interested in it, then it must have some merit. But check any thread at nearly any forum - mention cell - and you have a flurry of "negative" posts. And invariably they try to "proof" that it is not "really better than the XB360 CPU".

Who would be so much interested in trying - or putting so much effort into spreading FUD about a key technological part in the PS3? My guess - the master of FUD. The one company so used to spreading FUD. Maybe they realise that people are ignoring their "press releases". Why not just get a couple of people to man every message board where anything related to BR, PS3, Cell is remotely menstioned and "spam" the sites to create the illusion of negativity. Either that or there is nearly 5m XB360's out there gathering dust because their owners seem to be watching countless PS3 news sites waiting for any news item to post some or other "negative" comment on.

Back on the cell cpu. Have not noticed anyone except for MS and the XB360 fb's being interested in their CPU. Maybe they feel left out?

[THE TRUTH]

5 - 4get about the cell!!!
DC rider 360 - 1 Hour ago
the nvidia gpu is the ps3's LAST HOPE!!
Reply | Agree(0) | Disagree(0) | Spam/Offensive

I do respect your opinions, but do you even know what you are talking about to say such things? Reverse what you have said and lets "pretend that 360 had the cell and RSX along with a HD DVD drive. Would you be making the same statment? hmmmmm........

If you think the cell technology is "trash" then please let us all know why, there is no reason to much such a ignorant statement without justifing why you think it

[Watapata]

DC rider 360, is that statement really necessary/ It has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this thread. If you feel the need to mention this opinion of yours, mention it on a thread relating to the performance of the PS3. This is not the proper local to go about this...

[DG]

like the Intel/AMD processors ie. Quad/Duo Cores?

Imagine in 4 years a PC with those new blazing fast resistors and multiple Cores from IBM and some holographic storage. PS4/XB720 is looking sexy.

What if the next generation of gaming is some Matrix $#!T ???

[Silent]

you mean PS3/xboxx70. PS3 will still give the next xboxx--- challenge...if xboxx60 survives

[ApocalypseShadow]

is based on.look up the GS cube sony made back in i think 2001.sony ran 16 ps2s in parallel and added more ram to produce movie like graphics.i think they did the opening to the matrix(1) with trinity and pulled it off with square(enix).more cells working together create a supercomputer.as i said look up gs cube

[ApocalypseShadow]

was to figure out what kind of setup they could come up with for ps3 4 to 5 years later.interesting stuff

[ApocalypseShadow]

Interactive Matrix shown on GScube
Wednesday 15-Aug-2001 12:00 AM Sony demoed a real-time scene from The Matrix yesterday on its new CG development environment Gscube. We have the details

Incredible details are emerging from SIGGRAPH in Tokyo, where the mega-powerful GScube was demoed to the global technology community for the first time. Our man in Japan brought us a report that detailed a showing by Square, a scene from The Matrix and a view of what could herald a revolutionary new era in entertainment across the board.

"First up, Square demoed at SIGGRAPH yesterday. Attendees saw a quick reel of a female character waking up on a lounger [couch] in a space-craft. The hair has been brute-forced [a CG technique] because so many strands were involved. Everything in the scene had been multi-passed to get the skin and eyes just right. Attendees reckoned Kuturagi-san absolutely loved this."Read that again. Now get a load of this. "Eon showed a concept preview of The Matrix. It was from the scene at the beginning of the movie, the hotel ambush. What we got was a city-top view of an animated figure running and jumping across rooftops, but you couldn't distinguish from the actual film. It was in real-time. It had an interactive camera and they were moving it around."Several other demos were shown, one of which was a flight simulator by Silicon Studio, another was a scene from the movie Antz. 150 fighting characters were seen beating it out, each with 8,000 polys eachWhat we have just outlined is the future of videogaming. Highly placed sources within the industry have been talking for some time about the convergence of movies and games, where players interact with film quality graphics indistinguishable from real life. As reported yesterday, the GScube n a CG development environment powered by the guts of 16 PlayStation 2s n is designed to take is wares to broadband networks.Welcome to the age of e-cinema.How all of this will become possible is unclear. But rest assured that you'll be playing movies in some way, shape or form in the next five years. Just ask Ken Kutaragi. "You can communicate to a new cyber-city," he said in an interview with Newsweek earlier this year. "This will be the ideal home server. Did you see the movie 'The Matrix'? Same interface. Same concept. Starting from next year, you can jack into 'The Matrix'." No-one knew just how right he was�

now the jacking-in thing was crap but the idea of the gscube has been in sony's thoughts leading up to ps3.i stll think they could have had a gig of ram and a dvd player,but we'll just have to see what they can pull off in the next 5 years with ps3 and 360

[DG]

Is the PS3 more powerfull than the GsCube? Specs wise.