[Cbe-oss-dev] new product zego announced

[Geoff Levand]

Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Friday 15 August 2008, Geoff Levand wrote:
>> A new Cell product by Sony was announced this week
>> at SIGGRAPH:
>> 
>>   www.sony.com/zego
> 
> Ah, great to see new products!
> 
> How is it currently supported? Are you using the ps3 platform
> code or the bare-metal cell platform?

Sorry, I'm not so familiar with the details of the product.  I
don't have one, and wasn't involved in the development of it.

What I know is no hypervisor, and it has an OpenFirmware
implementation.

> Is the RSX support the same as on the PS3, or different in some way?

There is an OpenGL port.  Sorry, I don't know more about it than what
you can read in the brochures.  There is no video output, but an optional
video output adapter is available.

> How do you use the DDR2 and PCIe memory? Do you plan to use axonram
> for that or something different? I assume both of them will not
> be cache-coherent, so you can only efficiently use them for SPU code,
> but not through CI accesses from the PPU, right?

I'm not so familiar with the expansion memory, but I heard it
is intended as a ram disk, so I guess there is a block driver
for it.  I may be wrong about this.
 
> Do other distros just work out of the box, or did you have to make
> changes that are only present in YDL?

I guess there are device drivers needed.  I heard the OF provides
something similar to the QS2x.

I'll let you know when I get more info.

-Geoff