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Catching up with Intel, Sony has ever dreamed of the most beautiful chip

If you say now, Japanese semiconductor companies to surpass Intel, I am afraid that many people will laugh, although last year by Samsung surpassed, but Intel is still one of the strongest semiconductor manufacturers on this blue star, as for Japanese semiconductor manufacturers, whether it is to do storage of Kioxia, or to do sensor Sony, or Renesas in recent years, even the global semiconductor manufacturers TOP 10 have not squeezed in, can be described as a name.

However, everyone admits that the ancestors of Japanese semiconductors are still wide, going back to the 80s of the last century, several Japanese factories can be said to be powerful, Philips, Intel, Motorola... are just the defeated subordinates of Japanese semiconductors.

Catching up with Intel, Sony has ever dreamed of the most beautiful chip

But Japanese semiconductors are like a shooting star in the sky, after the brief glory of the 80s of the last century, and defeated in the United States, in 1985, the United States and Japan signed the Plaza Accord, the yen against the dollar appreciated sharply, resulting in the gradual collapse of the bubble of the Japanese economy, causing a wave of heavy blows to the semiconductor industry in Japan.

At the beginning of 1986, the US Department of Commerce ruled that there was unfair competition and low-price dumping of Japanese memory, and imposed 100% anti-dumping duties on Japan; In June 1987, the United States passed the "Toshiba Sanctions Act", canceling a series of procurement contracts and prohibiting all Toshiba products from exporting to the United States for 2 to 5 years; In 1991, the United States and Japan again signed a five-year "New Semiconductor Agreement", the United States required that the market share of foreign semiconductors in Japan must reach 20%...

Various unequal agreements and sanctions bills, Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Toshiba and Mitsubishi and other Japanese semiconductor five giants from prosperity to decline, this potential market to the United States, in 1996, the United States semiconductor accounted for more than 30% of the global market share, while Japanese semiconductors have less than 30%, the gap between the two countries gradually widened.

In order to help Japanese semiconductor manufacturers out of the predicament, Japanese companies have also carried out a self-help adjustment, in 1999, NEC and Hitachi respectively divested their DRAM businesses and established a new company Elpida, and the subsequent DRAM department of Mitsubishi Electric was also merged into Elpida, intended to counter American DRAM companies.

However, at this time, Japanese companies are not only conservative people, but also Japanese companies that are not willing to be ordinary, and they intend to learn to squirm on the salary and try the courage to climb the throne of the semiconductor world again through stud.

The birth and prototype of the Cell processor

In 2000, with the global success of the next-generation game console PS2, the popular SCE (Sony Computer Entertainment) began to prepare for the next generation of consoles, and CEO Ken Kumatsu Ryoki came up with a bold idea in his head, can we cooperate with American companies to create a general-purpose processor like Intel and PowerPC, which can be used not only on next-generation consoles, but also for other digital appliances and even servers, once successful. SCE can completely dominate the host market, and winning the next decade is no longer a dream.

Once this idea came out, it took root in the heart of Ryoki Ken for a long time, changed the semiconductor market pattern, and caught up with the industry leader Intel... Visions for the future seem to be beckoning to SCE.

In 2000, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), Toshiba and IBM signed an agreement to form the STI Alliance and set up a research and development center in Austin, Texas, which agreed that Sony would provide a financial budget for the next 4 years of research and development cycle, with IBM mainly responsible for processor research and development, and Toshiba responsible for the production of subsequent processors and related memory chips.

This research and development, that is, four or five years, Sony invested billions of dollars in research and development, almost exhausted the PS1 to PS2 savings, and this processor called Cell has not been available.

In 2003, Ken Kuzuki said in an interview with Japan's PCWatch that a sufficient number of Cell processors connected in series could achieve or even exceed the performance of the "Earth Simulator" (Earthシミュレータ, a supercomputer made by NEC, one of the fastest computers in the world at the time).

The processor that can simulate the earth has hung people's appetites at once, and everyone has turned their attention to this Sony, wanting to see what is so remarkable about this supercomputing processor.

In November 2004, IBM, Sony Corporation, Sony Computer Entertainment and Toshiba Corporation first disclosed some key concepts for the highly anticipated advanced microprocessor code-named Cell, a microprocessor jointly developed by the four companies for next-generation computing applications and digital consumer electronics.

At the conference, the four companies finalized that Cell is a multi-core chip containing a 64-bit power processor core and multiple collaboration processor cores capable of large-scale floating-point processing, optimized for compute-intensive and rich media broadband applications, including computer entertainment, movies and other forms of digital content.

According to the press release, some of the key advantages of the Cell processor in design include:

Multi-threaded, multi-core architecture

Supports multiple operating systems simultaneously

Rich bidirectional bus bandwidth for main memory and companion chips

Flexible on-board I/O (input/output) interface

Real-time resource management system for real-time applications

On-board hardware to support security systems for intelligent protection of intellectual property

90nm insulating silicon (Sillicon-on-insulator) technology is used

"Large and rich content, such as multi-channel HD radio programs and megapixel digital still/moving images captured by high-resolution CCD/CMOS imaging equipment, requires large-volume, real-time media processing capabilities. In the future, digital content in all formats will be converged and integrated into broadband networks, and an explosion will begin to occur. "Ken Ryoki Kuzuki, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony Corporation, President and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment," said. To freely access and/or browse vast amounts of content in real time, more advanced graphical user interfaces in 3D will become 'key' in the future." To handle such a rich range of applications, current PC architectures are approaching their limits in terms of both processing power and bus bandwidth. ”

All four companies showed the best sincerity for the Cell processor: IBM plans to start trial production of the Cell microprocessor at its wafer manufacturing plant in East Fishkill, New York, in the first half of 2005; Sony hopes to launch a broadband content and high-definition television (HDTV) system equipped with a Cell processor in 2006. Sony Computer Entertainment also hopes to launch its new generation of computer entertainment system equipped with Cell, the PS3, to revolutionize the computer entertainment experience; Toshiba envisioned multiple applications for Cell, and hopes to launch its first Cell-based product, a high-definition television system (HDTV), in 2006.

In 2004, on the eve of the release of the Cell processor, the ambitious Ken Ryoki even approached Apple CEO Steve Jobs to sell him the Cell processor, hoping that this cross-era processor could be installed on the next generation of Macs, hoping that the Cell ecosystem could be extended to personal computers and desktops.

However, Jobs did not give him face, directly rejected the proposal, he did not hide his disappointment in the design of Cell, saying that Cell is even better than PowerPC that has been used for so many years, and the latter thing I believe everyone knows, Apple announced at the second year's global developers conference to switch to the arms of Intel and x86, completely cutting off Sony's thoughts.

But Ryoki Ken is not discouraged, because Sony also has the big killer of PS3 this generation of consoles, PS1 and PS2 two generations of consoles have sold hundreds of millions of units worldwide, as long as the PS3 of the Cell chip is shot, don't care if you are Intel or Apple, you have to bow down in front of Sony.

Cell processors are unique and "powerful"

So much about the Cell chip mentioned earlier, Sony, IBM and Toshiba are full of confidence, but where it is powerful, I am afraid that everyone has not yet had a specific concept.

In 2005, Cell chip development was nearing completion, and trial production of the first chips began, which used a 90nm process, equipped with 4 PPE main cores (PPE, simplified from PowerPC970) clocked at up to 4GHz, and 32 SIMD-based coprocessors (Synergistic Processor Element) with a total of 1TFloaps computing power. Hereinafter referred to as SPE), the overall performance is not inferior to the top desktop processor, and even touched the threshold of the server chip, in addition to the integration of XDR memory controller, can cooperate with 25.6GBps bandwidth memory system, and its front side bus also uses 96-bit, 6.4GHz frequency FlexIO parallel bus (formerly known as "Redwood", developed by RAMBUS company), which is also the fastest computer bus ever.

However, the combination of 4 PPEs and 32 SPEs makes the chip area and power consumption reach a very high level, and the multi-core design also affects the final mass production yield

Catching up with Intel, Sony has ever dreamed of the most beautiful chip

(Performance comparison at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for Cell, AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium2, and Cray X1E.)

IBM also gave a specific technical analysis, CELL as a microprocessor, between traditional desktop processors (such as Athlon 64 and Core 2 series) and professional graphics cards (such as NVIDIA and ATI) hybrid, in the expectation, Cell can not only be used in entertainment equipment, high-definition displays and high-definition TV systems, but also in digital imaging systems (medical, scientific, etc.) and physical simulation (such as scientific and structural engineering modeling) It can be described as an all-round processor.

The Cell processor is specifically divided into four parts: an external input and output structure, a main processor called Power Processing Element (PPE) (a two-way synchronous multithreaded PowerPC 2.02 core), eight full-featured coprocessors called Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE), and connections to PPE, inputs/ A dedicated high-bandwidth cyclic data bus for output elements and SPEs, called the Element Interconnect Bus (EIB).

To achieve high-performance computing, Cell processors need to use EIB to connect SPE and PPE, access main memory and other external data stores through full cache-coherent DMA (Direct Memory access). To take full advantage of EIB and combine computing and data transfer, each of the processing elements (PPE and SPE) is equipped with a DMA engine. Since the load/store instructions of the SPE can only access its own local scratchpad memory, each SPE relies entirely on DMA to transfer data to the main memory and the local memory of other SPEs. The main design of the architecture is to use DMA as the core means of in-chip data transmission, in order to achieve maximum asynchronicity and concurrency in on-chip data processing.

In addition, PPEs capable of running legacy operating systems have control over the SPE and can start, stop, interrupt, and schedule processes running on the SPE. For this purpose, the PPE has additional instructions related to the control of the SPE. Unlike SPE, PPE can read and write to SPE's main and local memory through standard load/store instructions.

Despite the full architecture, the SPE is not fully autonomous and requires the PPE to spin it up before it can work. Since most of the computing power of the entire system comes from the coprocessor, on the one hand, DMA is used as a method of data transmission, and on the other hand, each SPE is limited by a small local cache, which is a very big challenge for developers who have never touched Cell software, and need to make very fine adjustments to the running software to maximize the potential of this processor.

In fact, the answer sheet handed over by IBM seems to be excellent but complicated, it takes a lot of effort to understand the difference between this processor and other ordinary processors, and the large scale of the prototype chip has also led to the final mass production delay, and finally Sony is forced to swing a machete at the Cell under realistic pressure.

This knife cut down, cut off a lot of performance, the final release of the first Cell processor only equipped with a main frequency of 3.2GHz PPE main core and 8 SPE coprocessors, in order to ensure the production yield, but also shielded 1 SPE, and an SPE is assigned to the operating system and audio, the game can only call 6 SPE, which integrates 234 million transistors, using IBM's 90nm SOI, Low-K process manufacturing, core area of 221 square millimeters, The chip size is comparable to Intel's dual-core Pentium D.

But don't be too pessimistic, Cell chip is actually not a simple CPU, but contains part of the function of the GPU, SPE coprocessor can theoretically perform geometric operations on physics, audio, light sources, and even simulate post-processing effects that the GPU does not support, such as tessellation, computer shader, etc., has the prototype of CUDA core in today's NVIDIA GPU.

When Cell began to develop, what Sony hoped was to use a Cell to be responsible for the function of the CPU, and another Cell to shoulder the function of the GPU, seemingly whimsical, but in fact it is not completely impossible, and in the future, manufacturers such as Leadtek released Cell-based PCI-E cards to accelerate video decoding.

In addition, because IBM considered the needs of the server at the beginning of development, and also used server-level 256MB XDR high-performance memory, Cell not only has strong floating-point computing capabilities, but also supports parallel computing and distributed computing well, as long as there are enough PS3 consoles equipped with Cell, it can form a supercomputer, which can be said to be beyond the reach of other desktop processors.

It stands to reason that PS3 is already invincible under the guidance of the Cell chip, in Sony's original vision, there is no need to say more about dominating the console market, and it is just around the corner to seize the desktop market, and the joke of "Sony is good" seems to have become a reality.

However, all of Sony's dreams began to be shattered the moment the PS3 was released.

Collapse and annihilation of the Cell processor

Why it broke down, the reason is still in the PS3 console.

As mentioned earlier, Cell can assume part of the function of the GPU, but this does not mean that Cell can be directly used as a GPU, graphics computing is ultimately handed over to the GPU to be responsible, IBM naturally does not produce GPUs, Sony can only turn to the two major graphics card manufacturers at that time NVIDIA and ATI, overtime in the PS3 into a custom RSX, which is based on the Geforce7800 series transformation, performance between G70 and G72.

But at this time is close to the release date, Cell chip 256M XDR memory, can only be used by CELL itself, RSX this GPU core can not share this part of the memory, in order to quickly go on sale, Sony and cram into 256M GDDR3 video memory, come and go, this cost has been a lot higher.

Not only that, in order to be compatible with the previous generation of PS1 and PS2 consoles, Sony also stuffed an additional EE+GS chip, using hardware compatibility to ensure that the previous generation of games can run perfectly on PS3, which is another bleeding.

In addition, Sony and Panasonic Electric and other companies established the "Blu-ray Disc Alliance" in 2004, intended to promote the popularity of the next generation of disc formats, and compete with the HD-DVD Promotion Association, PS3 at this time undertook the promotion of Blu-ray Disc, helping Sony win the disc format, while the previous generation PS2 won because of the support for DVD, plus Blu-ray drive is also reasonable.

According to the disassembly report, the cost of each Cell chip is about $89, the cost of RSX graphics card is about $129, the cost of Blu-ray optical drive is about $125, the cost of EE+GS is about $27, the cost of chip and optical drive alone has come to $370, and the total cost has even come to $805-840. You must know that the starting price of PS3 is only $499, not counting the pre-research and development and post-marketing costs, selling a net loss of more than $300, no matter how thick Sony's family can not withstand such a toss.

And due to the continuous addition of various chips, the power consumption of PS3 has also come to a terrifying level, when playing Blu-ray games, the total power consumption of PS3 easily exceeded 200W, even on the standby page of the menu, the power consumption will remain around 170W.

The high price is still second, Cell, the chip that Sony has placed its hopes on, really exerts the strength in the previous publicity?

In fact, the most critical six SPE coprocessors around the Cell chip, there are a total of three development modes, of which the mode that can maximize the potential of the coprocessor is also the most difficult to develop and optimize one, requiring developers to bypass the operating system, API and run, directly operate and develop on the SPE, the efficiency is terrible, only four of the six SPEs support this mode, from the birth of PS3 to discontinuation, not many games are developed in this mode, In 2006, when dual-core processors were popular, Cell chips, which were still essentially single-core processors, became a nightmare for developers.

What is even more ironic is that Sony's biggest rival, Microsoft, also uses IBM's processor on the Xbox 360, but Microsoft did not painstakingly develop it like Sony. But directly like IBM customized a xenon processor that integrates three 3.2GHz PowerPC cores, and these cores are nothing else, precisely Cell's PPE main core, and equipped with ATI's R500 graphics card, the overall architecture is very close to the PC, the difficulty of development has dropped significantly, a large number of PC games only need to be simply ported to land on Xbox 360, compared to PS3 is simply a world of difference.

However, the PS3 as a whole is not without merit, relying on good support for parallel and distributed computing, it can shine elsewhere.

In 2010, The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) built a set of affordable supercomputers, consisting of 1760 PS3s, 168 independent graphics processing units and 84 coordination servers, codenamed "Condor Cluster", to process satellite imagery, radar and research AI. AFRL has also opened up some of the computing power of the condor herd to some universities and research institutions, and it is revealed that the total cost of this supercomputing is about 2 million US dollars, the computing performance is 500TFlops, and the cost and power consumption are only one-tenth of the conventional supercomputing power of the same computing power.

In addition, Sony also announced in 2007 that the PS3 officially joined the Folding@home, a distributed computing project that studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation and related diseases, users can let their PS3 perform Folding@home distributed computing tasks when idle, as of September 2008, the participating PS3 game consoles provided 1.2PFlops of computing power, accounting for nearly 35% of the total computing power at that time.

But Cell's pace is limited to this, from release to discontinuation of support, except for PS3, IBM servers and supercomputing, Toshiba TV, no electronic products have used this strangely designed processor, into the desktop is completely unrealized, this processor developed for four or five years in the semiconductor market in a very unseemly posture into the soil.

Of course, some of Cell's ideas can also be found in various processors today, NVIDIA's CUDA core, AMD's APU, Apple's latest M series chips, perhaps part of their inspiration comes from the failed chip developed by IBM and Sony?

Guerilla Games' technical director, who developed the exclusive picture quality masterpiece "Killzone" for PS3, also remembered Cell in 2021, believing that this processor is still more powerful than any Intel CPU, it is ahead of the times, but it is difficult to grasp in terms of usability and balance.

The so-called one step ahead is a genius, and two or even three steps ahead, often become a martyr, this sentence is used to explain the history of Cell is most appropriate, perhaps Japanese manufacturers in the semiconductor ambition, the determination to catch up with the United States, with the departure of Cell, but also gradually disappeared.

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