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PPKE ITK PhD and MPhil Thesis Classes

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26 1. INTRODUCTION<br />

1.5 IBM Cell Broadb<strong>and</strong> Engine Architecture<br />

1.5.1 Cell Processor Chip<br />

The Cell Broadb<strong>and</strong> Engine Architecture (CBEA) [39] is designed to achieve high<br />

computing performance with better area/performance <strong>and</strong> power/performance<br />

ratios than the conventional multi-core architectures. The CBEA defines a heterogeneous<br />

multi-processor architecture where general purpose processors called<br />

Power Processor Elements (PPE) <strong>and</strong> SIMD 1 processors called Synergistic Processor<br />

Elements (SPE) are connected via a high speed on-chip coherent bus called<br />

Element Interconnect Bus (EIB). The CBEA architecture is flexible <strong>and</strong> the ratio<br />

of the different elements can be defined according to the requirements of the different<br />

applications. The first implementation of the CBEA is the Cell Broadb<strong>and</strong><br />

Engine (Cell BE or informally Cell) designed for the Sony Playstation 3 game<br />

console, <strong>and</strong> it contains 1 PPE <strong>and</strong> 8 SPEs. The block diagram of the Cell is<br />

shown in Figure 1.12.<br />

The PPE is a conventional dual-threaded 64bit PowerPC processor which<br />

can run existing operating systems without modification <strong>and</strong> can control the<br />

operation of the SPEs. To simplify processor design <strong>and</strong> achieve higher clock<br />

speed instruction reordering is not supported by the PPE. IT has a 32kB Level<br />

1 (L1) cache memory, which is a set-associative, parity protected, 128 bit sized<br />

cache-line memory, <strong>and</strong> 512kB Level 2 (L2) unified (data <strong>and</strong> instruction) cache<br />

memory.<br />

The Power Processing Element contains several functional units, which composes<br />

the Power Processing Unit shown in Figure 1.13.<br />

The PPU executes the PowerPC Architecture instruction set <strong>and</strong> the Vector/SIMD<br />

Multimedia Extension instructions. The Instruction Unit performs<br />

the instruction-fetch, decode, dispatch, issue, branch, <strong>and</strong> completion portions of<br />

execution. It contains the L1 instruction cache. The Load Store Unit performs<br />

all data accesses, including execution of load <strong>and</strong> store instructions. It contains<br />

the L1 data cache. The Vector/Scalar Unit includes a Floating-Point Unit (FPU)<br />

<strong>and</strong> a 128-bit Vector/SIMD Multimedia Extension Unit (VXU), which together<br />

1 SIMD - Single Instruction Multiple Data

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