top | item 22242152

(no title)

Nelson69 | 6 years ago

Wasn't "Roadrunner" powered by Cell? What's Cell doing these days?

discuss

order

nl|6 years ago

Cell was a PowerPC variant, which is still doing ok as the POWER series of CPUs. The Summit supercomputer[1] used POWER9 and is the fastest supercomputer in the world.

If you go speak to IBM and you have an interesting app you can get time on a POWER9 server to see how well it runs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(supercomputer)

reitzensteinm|6 years ago

Calling Cell a PowerPC is a bit of a stretch. The only reason to use the Cell was the SPEs, which had their own custom SIMD instruction sets. The PowerPC core was just there for coordination.

Any work you put in to optimizing your code for the Cell would be completely thrown out if you brought it to another POWER architecture. At that point you might as well have hopped over to x86, ARM, CUDA, Xeon Phi, the Connection Machine, whatever.