[extropy-chat] Greetings

Derek Zahn DerekZahn at msn.com
Fri Dec 9 16:39:23 UTC 2005


Eugen Leitl wrote:

> The flops are not that hot, but the SPEs can do very well with
in-register SIMD on integers.

? I am under the impression that the SPEs have very nice floating point
units; the cell processor has a theoretical rating of over 200 single
precision GFLOPS.  Of course, that's absolute best case, but it's
amazing to me nonetheless.  Additionally, the PS3 GPU should be able to
do another couple hundred GFLOPS in the pixel shaders (also best case,
etc etc).

> PS3 has been promised a Linux kit, and might come with 1-3 GBit
Ethernet ports each, 
> so vanilla MPI can give you a modest supercomputer on a single shelf

Yup, that's my hope.  I am a bit skeptical that Sony is going to be
eager to sell linux boxes at a loss so I'll believe it when I see it.
Until then I don't really want to spend time playing with a simulator.
If that doesn't work out, the gaming industry has produced similar
astonishing computation densities in the GPUs of PC-based graphics
cards.  The Cell looks really cool though and I'd rather use that.
Other non-PS3 Cell systems (like blade servers) might be barely within
the budget of a serious hobbyist.  I'm content to wait a while and see
what happens.

> So what are you going to do with it?
 
Play.  Dabble.  Muse.  Those outrageous GFLOP numbers would never
translate to LINPACK results primarily because of bandwidth constraints
but I'm curious about whether AI "substrates" could be designed
specifically to make best use of these architectures, perhaps modeled
roughly on the cortex.  I think it will be fun to look at.

In the meantime I'll probably spend the next year or so building a
legged robot with video cameras and touch sensors and so on; I have
built a number of "robots" before, with up to 25 degrees of freedom, so
it won't be too difficult and this will give some focus for specific
things to do with the CPUs.




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