Article: ISSCC 2008 Cell Processor Update
By: David Wang (dwang.delete@this.not.here.com), February 25, 2008 7:04 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 2/25/08 wrote:
---------------------------
>David Wang (dwang@not.here.com) on 2/25/08 wrote:
>
>>BTW, I then asked the presenter - what about 32 nm? If you're I/O limited now,
>>what are you going to do at 32nm? (assuming there is such a 32 nm port). He gave
>>a cryptic answer of "Well, the XDR stuff may be fairly old by the time 32 nm is
>>ready, so we may replace it with something else." I'm not sure what that means
>>exactly, but suppose they go with XDR2 and do a clean-sheet redesign of the I/O
>>blocks, that would alleviate the silicon layout/bump/package constraint.
>
>The rambus folks are definitely working on newer high performance I/O interconnects:
>http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT120307033606
>
>My guess is that's sort of what they were referring to, not XDR2.
>
>David
XDR2 is just speculation on my part. There's no guarantee that Cell 2 would have use Rambus technology.
Presumably, IBM/Sony aren't tied at the hip to Rambus. So if some other solution exists, they may go with that as well. My unsupported WAG would actually be GDDR5. For one thing, half of PS3's memory is GDDR3, the other half is XDR, that's a bit of a nightmare from a couple of different perspectives. It would be better if they can unify the memory - if not physically, then at least use the same type of memory.
David
---------------------------
>David Wang (dwang@not.here.com) on 2/25/08 wrote:
>
>>BTW, I then asked the presenter - what about 32 nm? If you're I/O limited now,
>>what are you going to do at 32nm? (assuming there is such a 32 nm port). He gave
>>a cryptic answer of "Well, the XDR stuff may be fairly old by the time 32 nm is
>>ready, so we may replace it with something else." I'm not sure what that means
>>exactly, but suppose they go with XDR2 and do a clean-sheet redesign of the I/O
>>blocks, that would alleviate the silicon layout/bump/package constraint.
>
>The rambus folks are definitely working on newer high performance I/O interconnects:
>http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT120307033606
>
>My guess is that's sort of what they were referring to, not XDR2.
>
>David
XDR2 is just speculation on my part. There's no guarantee that Cell 2 would have use Rambus technology.
Presumably, IBM/Sony aren't tied at the hip to Rambus. So if some other solution exists, they may go with that as well. My unsupported WAG would actually be GDDR5. For one thing, half of PS3's memory is GDDR3, the other half is XDR, that's a bit of a nightmare from a couple of different perspectives. It would be better if they can unify the memory - if not physically, then at least use the same type of memory.
David
