Friday, June 16, 2006

Researchers report - Cell is a winner

Ars Technica reports that a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have published the "first formal academic attempt to decide if Cell hardware is something that researchers will want to invest in" - "The Potential of the Cell Processor Scientific Computing."

The paper compare Cell's performance on these kernels to the performance of the Cray X1E, AMD Opteron, and Intel's Itanium2.

So how does Cell stack up in comparison to these three competitors? In a word, it screams.

Take a look at the following results for single-precision dense matrix multiplication, or GEMM (all numbers are Gflop/s):

Cellpm: 204.7

Cray X1E: 29.5

AMD64 7.8:

Itanium2: 3.0

The "pm" above means "performance model." Because Cell hardware isn't generally available for tests like this, the paper's authors used a combination of performance projections and benchmarks on a cycle-accurate simulation of Cell that IBM has released. Real-world results should be very comparable to those in the paper, if not even better.

Read the ars technica article linked here.

Read the research paper linked here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have similar comparisons with Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC T1 processor (previously code named Niagra) been published?

 
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