Optimizing Compiler for the CELL Processor

Abstract

Developed for multimedia and game applications, as well as other numerically intensive workloads, the CELL processor provides support both for highly parallel codes, which have high computation and memory requirements, and for scalar codes, which require fast response time and a full-featured programming environment. This first generation CELL processor implements on a single chip a Power Architecture processor with two levels of cache, and eight attached streaming processors with their own local memories and globally coherent DMA engines. In addition to processor-level parallelism, each processing element has a Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) unit that can process from 2 double precision floating points up to 16 bytes per instruction.