October 2008
Intermediate to advanced
744 pages
18h 21m
English
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10. Introducing the Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU)
The PowerPC Processor Unit (PPU) has many strengths, but the Cell’s extraordinary computing capability comes from its Synergistic Processor Units (SPUs). Unlike the general-purpose PPU, the SPUs were designed with a single goal in mind: high-speed vector processing. You won’t use SPUs for text processing, code compiling, or e-mail; but if you need to transform hundreds of thousands of pixels to a new coordinate system, SPUs will get the job done quickly.
The SPU’s architecture is much simpler than the PPU’s. There are no caches, no threads, no paging, and no memory segments. There are only two types of user registers. With the SPU, you don’t have to worry about microcoded instructions, cache ...
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