Hi, There is a simulator available from IBM for the Cell processor. Unfortunately it runs on a Fedora Core 4 x86 system, but it is pretty cool. It is a full system simulator and runs either standalone programs or a version of FC4. There is also a PowerPC 970 simulator available. I have played with the Cell simulator and it is pretty cool. I have not tried the 970 simulator yet. More information and links for the Cell simulator downloads can be found here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/ And for Power Architecture in general and the 970 simulator: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power The 970 simulator could be useful in the porting effort. Lloyd Staley On 11/27/05 4:32 AM, "Sven Luther" <sven.luther at wanadoo.fr> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 04:43:20AM -0700, William Kucharski wrote: >> >> On Nov 27, 2005, at 2:57 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote: >> >>> There's a lot of rumor about the Cell Processor being researched by >>> IBM/Toshiba/Sony for their next PS3 platform: >>> http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars >>> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html >>> >>> What about Solaris 10 on such a platform? >>> What the goods and bads? >> >> The biggest drawback is that Cell is NOT designed as a general purpose >> computing processor, but as a very specialized processor for video >> game usage. > > Notice that : > > 1) the Cell processor has 8 (or 16, not sure i remember well) Cell units, > which are capable of handling their own (DSP or SIMD like) instruction set, > which is totally unrelated to powerpc. > > 2) In addition of the Cell units, it also has a reduced PPC970 core to act > as control processor, and for handling non-purely-graphic stuff, like game > AI or other such. This is also the one booting the initial system. > > 3) The PS3 is interesting, but more interesting will be future IBM based > Cell blades, using the Cell units in scientific processing and such. > > As such, it should be relatively easy to run Polaris on the Cell, but taking > advantage of the actual Cell units would maybe not be that evident, and it > should be slower than an equivalent PPC970. > > Friendly, > > Sven Luther > > _______________________________________________ > powerpc-discuss mailing list > powerpc-discuss at opensolaris.org
