Sony PLAYSTATION 3 and the Cell Processor Dr. Hayden So Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 3 Sep, 2008

The “How Things Work” Series  7 sessions of electronics gadgets and food PS3, Robots, RFID, iPhone 3G, Green Energy Toys, HDTV, Blu-ray devices  Know how things around us work.. … and …  Know how YOU can design them one day.  Goal:

Sony PLAYSTATION 3 – Beyond a Game Console Open Development Platform Gaming Distributed Scientific Computing Super Computer Cluster

Inside a PS3 Cell Broadband Engine nVidia Reality Synthesizer (RSX) nVidia Reality Synthesizer (RSX)

Cell Processor  Co-developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM  9 Processor Cores in a chip 1 Power Processor Element (PPE) – 64- bit PowerPC two-way multithreaded 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE) – 128-bit SIMD RISC processors Only 7 out of the 8 SPE are being used  An enhanced version, PowerXCell 8i, is used to power the world fastest super computer  Most powerful processor among PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii (Warning: personal bias)

 To study the process of protein folding using computers all around the world. Works on PCs and PS3s around the world To better understand diseases such as BSE (Mad Cow), Alzheimer's, Huntington's  Need massive computing power: about a day to simulate a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000 of a second) of protein folding 30 CPU years for 1 protein fold  In Sept, 2007, awarded Guinness World Records as the “most powerful distributed computing network.” > 1 petaFLOPS Image courtesy of

Where do we go from here…? If you are interested in…Technical AreasEEE Program Knowing more about the design of the Cell Processor How does the whole system is designed? What about memory? How much? XDR? QDR? DDR? Graphics? Why is graphics handled by RSX but not Cell? Computer Architecture Embedded System Parallel Processing System Design Computer Engineering (CE) Electronics and Communication Engineering (EComE) Why only 7 SPEs are used? How to make XDR memory? How to manufacture all the fancy ICs on the PS3? Circuit Design VLSI Design VLSI Manufacturing Electronics and Communication Engineering (EComE) How to manage the massive amount of data collected in How to deal with Internet scale programming? Information System Network Programming Information Engineering (InfoE)