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Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and the Cell Processor. Dr. Hayden So Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 3 Sep, 2008. The “How Things Work” Series. 7 sessions of electronics gadgets and food PS3, Robots, RFID, iPhone 3G, Green Energy Toys, HDTV, Blu-ray devices
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Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and the Cell Processor Dr. Hayden So Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 3 Sep, 2008
The “How Things Work” Series • 7 sessions of electronics gadgets and food • PS3, Robots, RFID, iPhone 3G, Green Energy Toys, HDTV, Blu-ray devices • Know how things around us work.. … and … • Know how YOU can design them one day. • Goal:
Sony PLAYSTATION 3 – Beyond a Game Console Open Development Platform Gaming Distributed Scientific Computing Super Computer Cluster
Inside a PS3 Cell Broadband Engine nVidia Reality Synthesizer (RSX)
Cell Processor • Co-developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM • 9 Processor Cores in a chip • 1 Power Processor Element (PPE) – 64-bit PowerPC two-way multithreaded processor @3.2GHz • 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) – 128-bit SIMD RISC processors • Only 7 out of the 8 SPE are being used • An enhanced version, PowerXCell 8i, is used to power the world fastest super computer • Most powerful processor among PS3,Xbox 360 and Wii(Warning: personal bias)
Folding@home • To study the process of protein folding using computers all around the world. • Works on PCs and PS3s around the world • To better understand diseases such as BSE (Mad Cow), Alzheimer's, Huntington's • Need massive computing power: • about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second) of protein folding • 30 CPU years for 1 protein fold • In Sept, 2007, awarded Guinness World Records as the “most powerful distributed computing network.” • > 1 petaFLOPS Image courtesy of Folding@home