[hashcash] Re: PlayStation 3 - 16 trillion floating point operations / second
- From: Jonathan Morton <chromi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hashcash@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 06:15:42 +0000
Sony, IBM and Toshiba have released limited data about the so-called
Cell chip that will be able to carry out trillions of calculations per
second.<> The chip will be made of several different processing cores
that work on tasks together. The PlayStation 3 is expected in 2006 but
developers are expecting to get prototypes early next year to tune
games that will appear on it at launch.
When put inside powerful computer servers, the Cell consortium expects
it to be capable of handling 16 trillion floating point operations, or
calculations, every second.
Let's put this into perspective. This article sounds a whole lot like
the marchitecture for the VXA-100, the chip at the centre of the Voodoo
4 and 5 graphics cards. "With the power to perform over 1 billion
operations per second..."
Hashcash, and all other "proof of work" algorithms that I am personally
aware of, is inherently integer-based, and cannot be evaluated (at
least, not at all efficiently) on floating-point hardware. Indications
of floating-point performance of any given machine are completely
useless for predicting integer performance. Most likely, the integer
engine in the PS3 could be fairly compared to a PowerPC G3, as that's
all you need to run even the heaviest of current game/physics engines.
Remember the SNES and Megadrive, which used an 8-bit Z80 to run the
actual game, and a 32-bit 68000 to do the graphics.
Most of the floating-point hardware in the PS3 will almost certainly be
geared towards graphics, not general computation. As an example, the
ATI R300 GPU (from the Radeon 9700) is capable of about 6 gigaflops
(this is an extremely wild estimate, so revise up or down by about an
order of magnitude as you see fit), noticeably more than the CPU in the
same PC is likely to achieve, but you rarely see it being used for
scientific computations because that hardware is very specialised
towards graphics operations.
Finally, "when put inside powerful computer servers" means the Cell
people are probably talking about more than one Cell chip at a time -
probably *much* more - but the reporter has failed to recognise this
fact and/or make it clear to the public. It's not at all unlikely that
they're talking about multiple thousands, in which case it would look
rather silly if they *didn't* come up with performance in the
teraflops. The hardware to do teraflops, however, is rather unlikely
to find it's way into a consumer games console any time soon.
--------------------------------------------------------------
from: Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail: chromi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
website: http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
tagline: The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.
Other related posts:
