• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

"Organic" super computers. How long?

D

Dreamcast270mhz

Banned
Joined
Apr 25, 2009
Messages
168
Location
Virginia, USA
How long do you think it will be before the government begins using Organic super computers (Think Aurora Units, Metroid Prime 3) and the public know about it. Think, processing would then be unlimited compared to even today's Cell based computers because an Aurora Unit theoretically could receive DNA modifications for upgrades. I think in the next 50 years it will begin!
 
I think it is a long long time from now, if ever.

Silicon chip based machines have a lot of life in them. Cell was ground breaking in that it put many cores on a chip (9), and specialized the cores to specific tasks. It is the only chip I know of with two different instruction set architectures on the same piece of silicon, and it has tremendous memory bandwidth and floating point performance.

Look at the industry trend - exploiting parallelism in chips. Chips will get more cores quicker than software can keep up ... the challenge will be in making the software take advantage of all of the hardware. (As it has been for the last 20 years.)

Organic computers? If you need precise repeatable results, I don't see how an organic machine can be used. For some answers 'close' is good enough. But if you are doing large simulations or scanning for data, 'close' is insufficient.

PS - Free free to ask any question on Cell. I'm an expert. :)
 
This book is fairly recent: "Programming the Cell Processor: For Games, Graphics, and Computation" by Matthew Scarpino (Prentice Hall)


This one is free: "Programming the Cell Broadband Engine™ Architecture: Examples and Best Practices", IBM Redbook . Find it here: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247575.html
 
So, are you a fan of the PS3? I'm, not, but like dragonballz "I am Cell, the perfect warrior" the Cell chip is a great invention, and I really like the PPC architecture versus X86, but PPC is soo... expensive. This next part is off topic, but I think Sony messed up with the PS3 by trying to have the Cell chip assist the crappy GPU in calculations. The 360 did it better with their GPU, but of course, 3 cores can't beat 9.
 
The Chip is a hybrid. One of the CPU cores is a 64 bit PowerPC derivative, which is for running the operating system. The other eight cores are 'SPE's and are for doing the floating point calculations the chip was designed for.

We we use Cell chips in server blades we don't have a graphics card at all - just a serial console. All of the Cell demos from IBM render the graphics on the SPEs in real time. Keep in mind that the SPEs are very much like general purpose CPUs, and not custom built for graphics operations. That makes the real time rendering very impressive.

I'm not sure where Sony missed on the PS3 - all of my experience is on the Cell chip and the IBM server products built around it. I think that Sony built a better machine, but the expense of BlueRay and the initial difficulty in programming the Cell chip set them back a bit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top