It is no longer possible to obtain PLAYSTATIONs that can run Linux.
Because there is no other computer using the cell processor, the cell processor is dead and i do not
recommended to start learning it.
The cell broadband engine is a multi-core processor.
One of the cores, the so called PPE, is a general processor that can handle I/O, memory, etc.
And there are 6 so called SPEs that are spezialized to number crunching.
All the cores are 128-bit SIMD vector processors.
There are two ways to parallelize.
- Run the ray tracer on the six SPEs and merge the results.
- Rewrite the ray tracer to process 4 rays simultaneously using the SIMD vectors.
I implemented the first part. The following film shows the ray tracer in action. I started with 1 SPE and
incrementally increased the number until the maximal allowed 6 SPEs.
The ray tracer simply splits the screen into n parts and uses an SPE for each part. This is not optimal
but it should suffice for demonstration purposes.
