PS3 Cell chip saves more lives with medical imaging

by Ross Miller { Apr 9th 2007 at 7:58PM }

The use of the PlayStation 3 in the Folding@home project has proven to be phenomenally successful (even Team Joystiq -- thanks, guys!). Now, the Cell chip has served another purpose: 3-dimensional medical imaging.

IBM and Mayo clinic today announced that they have been using the Cell chip for imaging purposes such as cancer detection. According to the press release, the imaging program originally would run on typical processors and that optimized registration of 98 sets of images would take 7 hours typically. However, use of the application on the Cell-equipped IBM BladeCenter QS20 is 8 minutes 36 seconds -- approximately fifty times faster.

The PlayStation 3 itself is not being used for the imaging, and for that we say pity. We actually find it interesting watching the proteins fold and inviting our chemistry-oriented buddies over to identify common bonds and laugh at atomic jokes that we don't get. How about a downloadable application in the vein of this imaging program that both showcases the PS3's horsepower and shows interested parties how cancer looks inside the body?

The full results of the imaging experiment will be presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Symposium April 12 to 15 in Washington, D.C.

[Via The Mercury News]

Tags: breast cancer, BreastCancer, Cell, health, ibm, mayo, sony

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Storm9 @ Apr 9th 2007 8:14PM

Dayum! That chip is powerfull!
All the lazy game developers should stop complaning and start working on astonishing games.

TheGuy @ Apr 9th 2007 8:13PM

PS3: technology that is doing great good for society

360: technology that is allowing Microsoft to nickel and dime consumers out of their money

Wii: WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!

Matthew Mac @ Apr 9th 2007 8:16PM

Not to be a jerk, but what does this have to do with gaming? I mean, aside from once again proving the PS3 wasn't desinged as a game console?

arch @ Apr 9th 2007 8:17PM

storm your an idiot.
the cell chip in the PS3 is disgustingly NOT powerful compared to that one.(even without ocparing, especialy for gaming) Its completly watered down. the faster people stop believing the propaganda the better.

Kenban @ Apr 9th 2007 8:46PM

Not to nit pick too much but the QS20 blade center has two cell chips per a blade and it does not say how many blades it takes to do this application. Also it just says that it takes 7 hours on a traditional processor. Again what kind of CPU? and how many?

If I had to guess from the wording I would say they are comparing a single blade to a desktop PC running a single core CPU. So I believe they are comparing a computer designed to handle this kind of data with a total of 18 cores vs. a desktop PC with an out of date CPU.

I hate to say it but this also proves nothing this is the type of application the Cell is designed for. Its the kind of CPU that is perfect for just handling huge amounts of raw data. The problem is it does not run standard random programs very well.

umm.....hello?? @ Apr 9th 2007 8:48PM

@3
nothing. slow newsday for joystiq. this blog post belongs in engadget, not 'stiq.

however, ALL console chips are modified computer chips for the purpose of games, so technically, your statement is invalid about not being designed as a game console.

@1
you're an imbecile, considering that ALL THREE consoles use IBM chips for their processing. and how is Sony NOT nickle and diming their customers?? bluetooth accessories? BD-Rom? so you can hook up to @home for off-hours processing ON YOUR ENERGY BILL DIME...hello??!

@4
I partially agree. however watered down the chip might be, though, it IS modified to be more powerful towards a specific application (in this case, videogames), whereas the original form processor is a "be everything" processor.

@2
power has nothing to do with being lazy--it's having the tools to properly harness the power (game engines, such as HAVOC (for physics in games), RenderWare (general purpose) or SquareEnix's WHITE engine (general purpose), etc) and be able to easily write gamecode based off the game engine.

umm....hello??? @ Apr 9th 2007 8:53PM

@2 cont'd
so my point being (in case you didn't know/havent' figured out) that with a new generation of consoles (PSWii60), NEW engines have to be developed/modified, and as time goes on programmers become more familiar with the tools/power allocation/power available so as we see on the original xbox, ps1, ps2, NES, SNES, N64, GameCube, etc etc the games take better advantage of the system processing and thus, better gameplay/physics/sound/graphics, etc etc

NeverSage @ Apr 9th 2007 9:08PM

"Now, the Cell chip has served another purpose: 3-dimensional medical imaging."

Why not 4-dimensional? (bada bing!)

blamecanada @ Apr 9th 2007 9:16PM

The PS3 is an application of the Cell, the Cell wasn't made for the PS3.

miles foreman @ Apr 9th 2007 9:26PM

Concering the Folding@Home and PS3 dominance... does that mean that people are using their PS3s for Folding@Home instead of playing them?

mccomber @ Apr 9th 2007 9:26PM

"Why not 4-dimensional?"

OK, now THAT was funny.

Bill nye @ Apr 9th 2007 9:31PM

The problem with the cell in the ps3 is not that the cell doesn't have allot of power, its that the cells in the ps3 are not the higher end cell processors. Just like with any processor, some don't get made perfect, these are the ones that are made to have a slower clock speed since not all of the transistors are functioning. The more flaws they have the lower the clock speed is made. I imagine the ps3's cells are the middle ground where they are only downgraded so much but they are definitely not at the same level as the ones being used for these experiments.

The other issue is bottle necks, the PS3 simply doesn't have the bandwidth between the parts to use the full power of the cell. Information needs to travel from ram, video card, cpu, sound card, etc.. If your pathways can only handle so much traffic your not gonna be able to utilize the full power of your system.

soccerdrew17 @ Apr 9th 2007 9:52PM

sony is going to break the bank with the cell. They get money for every sell sold and they are likely to sell millions (non ps3) at this point. Seems as if sony is making really smart non gaming choices in their gaming console (blu ray and cell now).

Maybe the ps3 is just a front for the japanese mafia. The ps3 seems to be a front for everything else.

Jake @ Apr 9th 2007 10:03PM

You people SEEM to be more informed than myself, but this may not be the case. You might just be speaking out of your asses. The only "downgrade" I'm aware of in the PS3 Cell chips is the fact that it only utilizes 7 of the 8 SPEs. This was to increase yields in the manufacturing process. As far as I'm aware it still runs at 3Ghz.

And with regard to someone above who said the Cell wasn't developed for the PS3, I think your statement is probably untrue. I'm almost certain Kutaragi had a hand in Cell-development from the beginning. Originally it was planned to be the only chip in the PS3 (no dedicated GPU was intended - just like the EE in the PS2). I may be wrong, but I feel like the Cell was originally intended for use with the PS3, but Sony realized that with some modifications it could be used for several more applications. This obviously makes the R&D costs for the processor much more reasonable for the company.

Matt @ Apr 9th 2007 10:08PM

Gaming blog by day....

why not the LS2/LS7? @ Apr 9th 2007 10:12PM

How about they save me from dying of boredom by shipping some games?

Okay, I'm glad for Sony/IBM here. This is good stuff. But it isn't going to tide me over while I wait for the game drought to end.

LaughingTarget @ Apr 9th 2007 10:16PM

IBM was the key designer of Cell, not Sony. Sony had a hand in it, but it was IBM most of the way. Sony lacks the competency to develop this type of processor (see the PS2 for an example, that CPU was sad).

Because IBM was the key developer of Cell, it was designed as a supercomputing, single application chip as that is IBM's primary business. Sony just wanted the fastest CPU available and bankrolled some of it. Kutaragi had no say in how Cell was made, he doesn't have that level of expertise.

The outcome isn't surprising. Cell isn't a gaming chip, it is a supercomputing chip as shown above. Designed for productive sciences, not giving us pretty eye-candy. Sure, it can do it, but had Cell been designed for a game console, we'd be seeing something far more grand than what is in there now.

syco @ Apr 9th 2007 10:16PM

The Cell is a very parallel chip, and as such is absolutely fantastic for certain application, especially in the scientific and medical research fields, because those fields often have what programmers call "Embarrassingly parallel" problems that are more easily solved by many weak processors than one strong chip.

Gaming, however, is NOT an embarassingly parallel problem, generally. Rendering 3D images is, but that's why graphics chips are so parallel (and why Folding@home runs well on graphics chips). What the actual CPU in a gaming console has to do is generally helped by having 1-3 fast chips. All modern chips rearrange code to make it as parallel as possible internally anyway (ex SIMD, branch prediction, etc), but sometimes you just need to do things one step at a time because each step depends on data from the previous step.. And the Cell is HORRIBLE at that sort of work.

I feel I should know more about the Cell before I go into any more detail because I'd hate to say something that is demonstrably untrue, so I'll comment later if I have anything to add...

letmethinkaboutit @ Apr 11th 2007 9:47AM

how many chips...how much cache! How fast the Memory....how big the bus...how much Memory all these questions.....Comparing the ps3 cell is like compareing a any mound to a volcano. Give me a break! Yawn been there heard that. If it was so powerful it would be able to play games that or on both systems as good as the 360 but even up to the last reviewed multi platform game the 360 wins!(armor core 4 IGN). Give me a break! Ridge RAAAAAAACER! Fake zone I mean Kill Zone! Motor Storm!!!! lol Pleeeeease! Only fools believe the exact same rehash hype over and over while there system gets stomped, in the graphics department. Frame rate,,,,textures, Polygons,,, and AI it loses!!! but PS3 has more storage! 40% slower to access the storage but it has more capacity per exspensive disk! (sorry permantly fools I didn't mean to sound so harsh).

why not the LS2/LS7? @ Apr 9th 2007 10:22PM

Jake:
I was at a major computer manufacturer when IBM tried to sell us on the Cell years before PS3 came around (we turned it down because it was single-issue, a big problem for company that needs binary compatibility across a family of workstations). IBM created the Cell architecture without consulting Sony.

One of the attributes Cell has is it is literally organized into little cell areas. In each cell you can have different modules (within reason, and I think some are "double-wide"). You could make a Cell chip with two PowerPCs and 4 SPUs if you want, or maybe three PowerPCs, a SPU and a network processor.

The particular configuration of processor in the PS3 is most certainly tailored to Sony, so you could say Sony co-designed the particular Cell they use (and IBM uses for these other tasks too, because the chip is already in production).

Bill Nye:
You are incorrect in many ways. The clock rate on the PS3 is right in the sweet spot of where Cell was designed to run. And flaws don't lower clock speed. If a chip has a flaw, it fails to work completely and is thrown out.

And the bandwidth on the PS3 is massive, you are going from bad info. The PS3 doesn't have one large shared bus like the 360 does. The PS3 busses thus don't carry as much each, but there are more of them. It's like 360 has one 10 lane highway and PS3 has 5 two lane highways. Each is faster for different things, but the aggregate throughput is similar.

ummm...hello:
PS3 works with all Bluetooth headsets. You can buy a Motorola one and use it with PS3. Or you can buy a Logitech USB headset and use that. It works with Bluetooth keyboards, whether Sony or not. You can use any company's memory card, including SD and CF on the 60GB unit.

Sony is not nickle and diming customers to the same level MS is.

syco @ Apr 9th 2007 10:33PM

I don't know, maybe someone can help, but does the Cell pipeline instruction from SPU to SPU? I mean, I imagine if you coded it specifically the PPU would be more than happy to instruct the SPU's to do so, but, assuming the code can flow like that, does it actually do it automatically in hardware like most modern CPU's try to do with the more general tasks (ex. instruction fetch, memory read and write, etc)?

Lekko @ Apr 9th 2007 10:53PM

The Cell isn't optimized to run a lot of things, but I do see it being perfectly suited to a few things that will become huge in games.

You're right, the Cell is not the best at AI, which is fine because nobody really plays the AI now anyways, seeing as everything is shifting to online multiplayer anywho. It's not that great at spaghetti code, which is why it does not make the best PC cpu. It is however ideal for physics, which is what I really really really want to see the PS3 push. I can easily see the PS3 trouncing the 360 in any game that utilizes physics, while the 360 version will probably look better than the PS3 since it is stronger graphically. Each system has their strong suits, I think the PS3's is physics and space (obviously).

Paul @ Apr 10th 2007 1:08AM

First off the cell is an extremely faulty chip. Secondly it's very short lived in medical research. The reason is that technology moves extremely fast. My brother's wife has an uncle that has been involved with military medical research for the US military and they have chips that make what we have in our consoles look like 3rd world country crap. Just like SETI it's a way to make the consumers feel like they are contributing to something. It's like dropping a smart bomb that's nothing but a grenade. One thing people should remember is that Blue ray is old tech, over 10 years old. No wonder they have high memory capacities. While HD DVD is half as old. The tech is vastly superior and given enough time they will pass all that BR has to offer. They are even equaling the storage of BR per disc this month.

Kenban @ Apr 10th 2007 1:03AM

The funny part about reading number 19's comment (why not the LS2/LS7?) is that I thought you were going somewhere with the fact that the Cell can be made in differant versions. The Cell processor in the PS3 is actually the generic standard version. Its not a custom build for Sony but a custom version does exist. I figured with your comments that you knew what it was.

The CPU of the xbox 360 known as the Xenon also produced by IBM is actually just a custom version of the Cell processor. The standard cell chip has 1 PPC core and 8 SPU's. The chip in the PS3 can have one bad SPU to improve yields and lower costs. The Xenon has 3 PPC cores and no SPU's. But in the end the 360's CPU is based on the Cell processor.

why not the LS2/LS7? @ Apr 10th 2007 2:48AM

Kenban:
The Xbox 360 processor is not a Cell in any way.

The PowerPCs cores in the Xbox 360 are each noticeably superior to the single PowerPC core in the Cell. Each core in the 360 not only supports multiple execution units (but are in-order, not supporting OOC), but also supports hyperthreading. Cell has a single-issue (only one execution unit in operation at once) PPC core.

Ian Von Porter @ Apr 10th 2007 4:55AM

Lots of FUD on this thread.

John @ Apr 10th 2007 7:20AM

WOW the ps3 seems to do everything!!!! except play good games.... go figger

mj @ Apr 10th 2007 8:57AM

Let's give credit to Sony. I thought that the Cell marketing line was hogwash. They said the ps2 would be used in other electronics, and it never was. Now the Cell has been used in another application.

Good for them. I'm still not paying for one, but it's about time they had some good news to report that didn't involved demoting Kutaragi-san.

@Kenban: you're off your rocker. The 360 chip is a PowerPC chip. It's so close to PowerPC that the 360 Dev kits were originally Apple PCs, a delicious irony for a MS-based console. This was widely reported.

The Cell isn't really like anything else, and that's the problem with PS3 game development.

Jake @ Apr 10th 2007 9:14AM

Wow. Tons of FUD. I'll try to reduce this thread to layman's terms.

The Cell is more powerful theoretically than the Xenon in the 360. The 360 does, however, have a superior gpu and the cpu is geared more specifically towards games. All considered, the two are nearly identical in what they can put on the screen.

The 360 may have an edge in producing textures and fine detail, and the PS3 will likely never match Gears in that respect. The PS3 may have an advantage in processing physics. We have yet to see any of this, though, because the PS3 dev tools are currently quite weak.

The PS3 truly is a Trojan Horse, though, for both Cell and Blu-ray. The Cell processors in the PS3 are lower yield chips from the manufacturing process. The higher yield chips go to things like medical and defense computers. The very low yield chips Sony would like to get into cell phones and other low demand systems.

And obviously every PS3 sold is another blu-ray player on the market. Hell, every PS3 game is a blu-ray advertisement. If it weren't for the PS3, I wouldn't even know what blu-ray is. If blu-ray takes off as well as "the cell", Sony could likely make more money off of those two things than off of the PS3 itself.

Think about it. The PS3 has shown no advantages over the 360 for gaming and came out a year later. The Cell and Blu-ray both drive up the cost and delayed the system, with no apparent gaming advantage. Why would Sony have them in there?

Todd @ Apr 10th 2007 9:36AM

I wonder how much Sony is charging medical research for the use of their PS3/technology... still $600 or four times that?

Wes @ Apr 10th 2007 11:23AM

Totally blone out of proportion. This is a not a ps3 cellprocessor or anywhere near close. Each one of these processors designed to be in an array costs $18,995.

http://www-306.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/7/897/ENUS106-677/index.html

Wes @ Apr 10th 2007 11:28AM

This basically is the equivilent of saying that Quad Core intel processors could be added into a giantic array to give awayyyy faster performance than the old system it replaced (which might have been 5? 10? 20 years old).

Therefore xbox 360 ruxxxxorsss!? Wait, no, the xbox 360 does not use quad core processors but neither is the PS3's Cell processors anywhere near as powerful as the array of $18,995 machinces they used.

Already people have mis-read this article and are interpreting it to mean PS3 = OWNAGE cause its 50 times faster!!! no, they are saying a $18,995 is 50x faster than a $2,000 system. Wow? realllly? SHOCKING. MUST POSt AS NEWS STORY ON JOYSTIQ!