[Cbe-oss-dev] new product zego announced

[Akira Tsukamoto]

Hi Arnd,

On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:07:27 +0200, 
Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de> mentioned: 
> 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!

We have couple of these at our Tokyo office.
Here has the promotion video of the product.
http://www.sony.co.jp/SonyInfo/News/Press/200808/08-095/index.html
Actually it is the same Cell BE machine which was demonstrated at 
SIGGRAPH last year.

> How is it currently supported? Are you using the ps3 platform
> code or the bare-metal cell platform?

It is bare-metal, no hypervisor like PS3. The kernel is almost identical 
with IBM Cell Blades.

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

It comes with RSX binary driver supplied by nVidia. It is not frame 
buffer like PS3; it has 3D acceleration capability.

> 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?

The South bridge chip is the same with Toshiba Celleb and QS20 and do 
not have axonram.

> Do other distros just work out of the box, or did you have to make
> changes that are only present in YDL?

It only comes with YDL but since the kernel is almost identical with 
QS2X series it should not be difficult to run Fedora.

Akira
-- 
Akira Tsukamoto
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. 
Distributed OS Development Dept. 
Japan