Understanding the Cell Microprocessor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 17, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Cell’s Approach - In Order with no Cache
Remember that the Cell’s architects designed the processor while evaluating the incremental performance each transistor they used resulted in (somewhat exaggerated, they didn’t count every last one of the 234 million transistors, but they evaluated each architectural decision very closely). In doing so, the idea of in-order vs. out-of-order must have raised a huge debate, given the increased complexity that an out-of-order core would add.With the major benefit of out-of-order being a decrease in susceptibility to memory latencies, the Cell architects proposed another option - what about an in-order core with controllable (read: predictable) memory latencies?
In-order microprocessors suffer because as soon as you introduce a cache into the equation, you no longer have control over memory latencies. Most of the time, a well-designed cache is going to give you low latency access to the data that you need. But look at the type of applications that Cell is targeted at (at least initially) - 3D rendering, games, physics, media encoding etc. - all applications that aren’t dependent on massive caches. Look at any one of Intel’s numerous cache increased CPUs and note that 3D rendering, gaming and encoding performance usually don’t benefit much beyond a certain amount of cache. For example, the Pentium 4 660 (3.60GHz - 2MB L2) offered a 13% increase in Business Winstone 2004 over the Pentium 4 560 (3.60GHz - 1MB L2), but less than a 2% average performance increase in 3D games. In 3dsmax, there was absolutely no performance gain due to the extra cache. A similar lack of performance improvement can be seen in our media encoding tests. The usage model of the Playstation 3 isn’t going to be running Microsoft Office; it’s going to be a lot of these “media rich” types of applications like 3D gaming and media encoding. For these types of applications, a large cache isn’t totally necessary - low latency memory access is necessary, and lots of memory bandwidth is important, but you can get both of those things without a cache. How? Cell shows you how.
Each SPE features 256KB of local memory, more specifically, not cache. The local memory doesn’t work on its own. If you want to put something in it, you need to send the SPE a store instruction. Cache works automatically; it uses hard-wired algorithms to make good guesses at what it should store. The SPE’s local memory is the size of a cache, but works just like a main memory. The other important thing is that the local memory is SRAM based, not DRAM based, so you get cache-like access times (6 cycles for the SPE) instead of main memory access times (e.g. 100s of cycles).
What’s the big deal then? With the absence of cache, but the presence of a very low latency memory, each SPE effectively has controllable, predictable memory latencies. This means that a smart developer, or smart compiler, could schedule instructions for each SPE extremely granularly. The compiler would know exactly when data would be ready from the local memory, and thus, could schedule instructions and work around memory latencies just as well as an out-of-order microprocessor, but without the additional hardware complexity. If the SPE needs data that’s stored in the main memory attached to the Cell, the latencies are just as predictable, since once again, there’s no cache to worry about mucking things up.
Making the SPEs in-order cores made a lot of sense for their tasks. However, the PPE being in-order is more for space/complexity constraints than anything else. While the SPEs handle more specified tasks, the PPE’s role in Cell is to handle all of the general purpose tasks that are not best executed on the array of SPEs. The problem with this approach is that in order to function as a relatively solid performing general purpose processor, it needs a cache - and we’ve already explained how cache can hurt in-order cores. If there’s a weak element of the Cell architecture it’s the PPE, but then again, Cell isn’t targeted at general purpose computing, despite what some may like to spin it as.
The downsides of an in-order PPE are minimized as much as possible by making the core only 2-issue, meaning that at best, it could execute two operations in parallel. So, execution potential lost to in-order inefficiencies are minimized in a sense that at least there aren’t a lot of transistors wasted on making the PPE an extremely wide chip. A good compiler should be able to make sure that both issue ports are populated as frequently as possible, despite the fact that the microprocessor is in-order. The PPE is also capable of working on two threads at a time, also designed to mask the inefficiencies of an in-order core for general purpose code.
Architecturally, if anything will keep Cell out of being used in a PC environment, it’s the PPE. A new Cell with a stronger PPE or an array of PPEs could change that, however.
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Poser - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
There were moments while reading this article that I expected there to be a "Test Yourself" quiz at the end of the chapter ... er, article. Which isn't to say that articles like this are too textbookish, it's to say that they're wonderfully educational. And very, very cool for being so.I'm half joking when I say this (but only half) -- a real "test" at the end of the article would be fun. I could see if I really understood what I read, and even get to compare my score to the rest of the, uhm, class.
drinkmorejava - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
very nice, how long did it take to write that thing?Eug - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
#42,That's an interesting page, cuz everyone on OS X already knows that Word is slow on the Mac. It brings us back to the original statement that some ported software may be problematic performance-wise.
And the generic comment on the Mac side about Premiere is, well... use Final Cut Pro. :) Here is a test that seems a bit more useful, since it tests Cinema4D and After Effects, two apps that people use on the Mac and both of which are reasonably well optimized:
http://digitalvideoediting.com/articles/viewarticl...
That's a good point about the memory scaling though. The IMC with AMD's chips is a definite advantage. I'm sure the G5 970MP dual-core won't get an IMC either.
Anyways, as far as this article is concerned, the G5 is kinda irrelevant. The interesting part for Apple in Cell is the PPE unit. It's also interesting that Anand says the original SPE was supposed to be VMX/Altivec. But the current SPE is not Altivec so it's less applicable for Apple, at least in the near term.
It would be interesting to know how fast a dual-core 3 GHz PPE would be in general laptop-type code, and how much power it would put out.
MDme - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
#39, 40, 41http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,p...
remember that the athlon 64 chips scale better at higher clock speeds due to the mem controller scaling as well.
Eug - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
Well, one example is Cinebench 2003:The dual G5 2.0 GHz is about the same speed as a dual 0pteron 246 2.0 GHz, with a score at around 500ish.
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=60000284
BTW, a dual G5 2.5 GHz scores 633.
suryad - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
Hmm that is interesting what you say Eug. I see your point do you have any links on straight comparos between an FX and a top of the line Mac? Or from personal experience folding and such...Eug - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
#38. It's a mistake to say an AMD FX 55 smokes a dual G5 2.5. For instance, if you like scientific dual-threaded stuff, the G5 does very well. However, the AMD FX 55 IS faster than a single G5 2.5. It's got a slight edge clock-for-clock, and it's clocked slightly higher too.The real problem is when you have stuff built for x86 ported over to PPC. It just isn't great on the Mac side performance-wise in that situation. And Macs aren't tweaked for gaming either. The AMD is going to smoke the Mac in Doom 3 of course.
I think with the performance advantage of the Opteron, I'd put a single G5 2.5 in the range of performance of a single Opteron 2.2-2.4 GHz, depending on the app. The real interesting part though will be the coming quarter, when the new G5s are released. They should get a significant clock speed bump (20%?) and information on dual-core G5s are already out there (like with AMD and their dual-core Athlons). They also get a cache boost. Right now they only have 512 KB, but are expected to get 1 MB L2.
suryad - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
Well scrotemaninov I am not disputing that the POWER architecture by IBM is brilliantly done. IBM is definitely one of those companies churning out brilliant and elegant technology always in the background.But my problem with the POWER technology is from what I understand very limitedly, is that the POWER processors in the Mac machines are a derivative of that architecture right? Why the heck are they so damn slow then?
I mean you can buy an AMD FX 55 based on the crappy legacy x86 arch and it smokes the dual 2.5 GHz Macs easily!! Is it cause of the OS? Because so far from what I have seen, if the Macs are any indication of the performance capabilities of the POWER architecture, the Cell will not be a big hit.
I did read though at www.aceshardware.com benchmark reviews of the POWER5 architecture with some insane number of cores if I recall correctly and the benchmarks were of the charts. They are definitely not what the Macs have installed in them...
scrotemaninov - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
#35: different approaches to solving the same problem.Intel came up with x86 a long time ago and it's complete rubbish but they maintain it for backwards compatibility (here's an argument for Open Source Software if ever there was one...). They have huge amounts of logic to effectively translate x86 into RISC instructions - look at the L1I Trace Cache in the P4 for example.
IBM aren't bound by the same constraints - their PowerPC ISA is really quite nice and so there's no where near the same amount of pain suffered trying to deal with the same problem. It does seem however, that IBM are almost at the point that Intel want to be in 10 years time...
Verdant - Thursday, March 17, 2005 - link
here is a question...it mentions (or alludes) in the article that having no cache means that knowing exactly when an instruction would be executed is possible, is the memory interface therefore a strict "real time system" ?