18 Nov
2006
18 Nov
'06
10:24 a.m.
jim stephens wrote:
I'd just like one of the Cell processors, forget the game, to play with,
and a linux distro to run on it.
Sorry for way way off topic.
Jim - check out IBM's web site. A simulator for the Cell chip and an
SDK (version 1.1) are available. (SDK 2.0 is coming out soon.) You can
download onto a Fedora Core 5 x86 box and simulate your own Cell
processor, including Linux and the Cell specific stuff.
Cell reminds me a lot of programming on my older iron. The 'SPUs' are
coprocessors with 256KB of memory, no cache, no virtual memory, no
shared libs, etc. If you start trashing your code with a loose pointer,
it just hangs. The CPU pipelines are very simple, so static timing
analysis is possible.
And one of the best joys of programming on Cell is scheduling your own
DMA transfers. :-)
Mike