Blade Watch

http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/IBM-Cuts-Cell-Loose-71994607.html

A few weeks ago, I speculated that IBM would probably not develop a follow-on Cell processor for the HPC market beyond its current PowerXCell 8i. A recent report by German publication Heise Online (English translation here) seems to bear this out. The article asserts that IBM’s plans for its next-generation Cell processor have been scrapped.

According to Heise, IBM VP of Deep Computing David Turek confirmed that there will be no successor to the PowerXCell 8i, the high performance Cell variant IBM developed for the Roadrunner supercomputer and its QS22 blades. Mercury Computer Systems, Fixstars, and Sony, also incorporated the processor into a few systems, but the technology was never widely deployed. At one time IBM had talked about expanding the Cell’s Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) from 8 on the PowerXCell 8i up to 32 on the next-generation chip. That would have kept the processor on pace, performance-wise, with the latest and greatest GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA. Apparently though, this is not to be.

There will be continued discussion about this. I remain a fan of the IBM Cell processor technology, they are meant to be great in high performance computing, but as with any processor technology the performance depended on the application being written and optimized for the platform. I’m off to read up more about the Cell processor and see if I can find out more.

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