Scaled-Down Version of Cell Beats Intel Core 2 Quad!

[Ascended_Saiyan]

We know that Toshiba was working on a lesser version of the Cell (like in the PS3) to put in their TVs and computers. It consists of only 4 SPEs (no PPE). It's called the SpursEngine (SE1000).

Well, in an encoding test (1080p H.264 video to 480p), the 4 SPEs encoded the video in HALF the time it took Intel's Core 2 Quad @ 3GHz processor!

The PCI Express x1 card houses a 65 nm Cell BE processor running at 1.5 GHz (compared to the 3.2 GHz in the Playstation 3) as well as four active SPE units (PS3: 7) and 128 MB XDR DRAM memory (PS3: 256 MB). Essentially, the SE1000 has about half the resources of the Cell engine in the PS3.

However, the demonstration results were quite spectacular. The video transcoding process takes about half as long on a SE1000 than on a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU. Keep in mind that this is a very specialized application, while the Core 2 Quad is a much more universal chip, but the simple performance potential is impressive nevertheless. Especially if you consider the fact that the accelerator consumes only 10 to 20 watts.

Source


Here is another example of what can be achieved with properly optimized code for the Cell. This was posted on Beyond3D.com with a rough math breakdown of what that means.

The team spent about eight months on the project first implementing the algorithm on a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Using the PC, the team showed machine vision that could recognize in three minutes a bar stool in an image of an office setting.

Using a network of three Playstation3 consoles linked to a PC, the tem was able to speed the recognition rate up to just one second.

...
Overall the three consoles handled the work at rates up to 140 times the speed of the single PC processor, Felch said.

Let us make some rough deductions.

3 Cell at 3.2 GHz = 140 Core Duo at 2 GHz
+ Assuming 1 Cell at 3.2 GHz = 4 SpursEngines at 1.5 GHz =>

1 SpursEngine at 1.5 GHz = 11.7 Core Duo at 2.0 GHz for this particular image processing application.

Assume 1 Quad core at 3.0 GHz = 3 Core Duo at 2.0 GHz

And then we have 1 SpursEngine at 1.5 GHz = 3.9 Quad Core at 3.0 GHz for a comparable image processing application.

Source

I can't wait to see what 1st and 2nd party developers will be able to do on the PS3 with highly efficient code tailored for it's architecture.