Though it was designed as the heart of the upcoming Sony PlayStation3 game console, the STI Cell processor has created quite a stir in the computational science community, where the processor's potential as a building block for high performance computers has been widely discussed and speculated upon.
To evaluate Cell's potential, computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluated the processor's performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The results of the group's evaluation were presented in a paper at the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, held May 2-6, 2006, in Ischia, Italy.
"Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency," the authors wrote. While their current analysis uses hand-optimized code on a set of small scientific kernels, the results are striking. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors, despite the fact that Cell's peak double precision performance is fourteen times slower than its peak single precision performance.
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