PowerBlock 200: ruggedized cell box for military use

Mercury Computer Systems has unveiled the PoweBlock 200, a ruggedized 200 gigaflop system to be powered by IBM's cell processors. According to the company, the system will be as powerful as a machine powered by 45 Pentium 4 processors, but will fit into a box the size of a toaster. The system is to be based on the Cell BE processor, which is a multiprocessor system-on-a-chip that includes eight specialized co-processors. No pricing has been announced for the PowerBlock 200, but, trust us, you can't afford it (unless your last name is Rumsfeld, that is).

[pud-box 360 @ Jan 16th 2006 2:55PM]

If only that much computing power was given to the pharmaceutical / medical researchers instead of the military ... (or maybe the console gaming industry instead ...)

[Paul @ Jan 16th 2006 3:07PM]

If the cell processor really was this powerful then i dont think intel/amd would keep their current release roadmap. They'd just skip a few years... So i doubt its that powerful at all or amd/intel would be pooing themselves. Its usually easy to judge how revolutionary a product is by how its competitors are behaving. er "specialised" co processor..... Maybe it will be like having 45 pentium 4's and it actually costs the equal amount of 45 pentium 4's..

[the dibb @ Jan 16th 2006 3:14PM]

awwwwwwwwwwwww yeah, this means power like this will be mainstream in 5-10 years, how tite is that?

[Dubious @ Jan 16th 2006 3:17PM]

200 gigaflops seems kind of slow. Aren't the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in the teraflops?

[conglacio @ Jan 16th 2006 4:05PM]

Paul, the reason that Intel and AMD would not go 100% cell is that Cell is not so well suited for normal PC use, especially as it needs quite a few processors to match a P4.



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I would like to case mod one of them with an actual toaster!

[TC @ Jan 16th 2006 4:10PM]

#3 Total power of xbox is just over a teraflop, PS3 just over 2 teraflops - but that's total system power (i.e including the GPU)- 200 Gigaflops would be a lot for just a processor to pull off, but floating point performance is just one of many benchmarks for a CPU. I can understand why the military would need hefty floating point performance (Battle simulation, missile trajectory planning etc.), but I'm not sure why they'd need it 'ruggedized', as I would have thought all that planning goes on outside of the battlefield. Maybe it's to protect the system when the Sergeant beats it with his fists!

[Pat @ Jan 16th 2006 4:37PM]

It needs to be rugged because it'll be going into military vehicles, humvees, APCs etc.



I believe the whole "it's as powerful as 20 PowerPcs or 45 Pentium4s" is talking about just the kinds of tasks this product will be used for, which is fair enough, if that is indeed the case. We've seen applications from IBM where Cell is up to 50 times faster than a PowerPC, so it's not that unbelievable.



How this compares to the console CPUs is this:



PS3: 218Gflops

PowerBlock200: 200Gflops

Xbox360: 115Gflops (although, it is effectively a bit less than this, as the VMX and FPU units in the Xenon cores usually cannot execute in parallel. The actual figure is closer to ~77Gflops. PS3 Cell's figure is a little lower too, because the same applies to its PPE - it's more like 205Gflops total).

[Neoterix @ Jan 16th 2006 5:04PM]

Yup, there's definitely a market for very fast computing on the go, in combat situations. I remember reading about a system that, based on a couple mics could determine the location of sniper shots. Just imagine one of these going in every humvee, predicting the positions of badguys (where, what weapons, how many rounds expended, accuracy), real time, based on acoustics information?



It could seriously help the ****hole that is modern urban warfare these days.

[Dave @ Jan 16th 2006 5:26PM]

Notice they fail to mention which flavor Pentium 4 the comparison is against. My money is on a 1.4 GHz Willamette.

[Dave @ Jan 16th 2006 5:29PM]

#7 - I believe L.A. and a few other cities use similar accustic triangulation to locate gunshots and report it. doesn't take that much processing power, just sensitive mics being sampled really damn fast.

[pbase @ Jan 16th 2006 7:40PM]

I seem to remember that the US refused to export Mac G3's to certain countries, because of the risk of having the technology "repurposed" to nefarious ends.

If you throw this thing into Humvees and other vehicles that enter the theater, don't you risk losing the unit when the vehicle is destroyed?

Bad idea to put these in the field. Keep 'em in the war room.

[Mike @ Jan 16th 2006 9:54PM]

I hear they're going to rename it to the MacBlock Pro :P

[H3llphyre @ Jan 16th 2006 10:29PM]

Having worked at Mercury and being a good friend, with the lead engineer responsible for the optimized libraries for their products, their claims are pretty much true. They used to exclusively use motorola processors, moved to the IBM 970, and now the Cell. They also have P4 blade systems.



Just another note. These systems will trickle down to medical applications, as they design systems for use beind MRIs and other data intensive devices.



The point is, these are very specialized pieces of hardware, meant to only deal with a specific set of data. They sit at very high CPU utilization. You'd have to see their hardware, and applications, to really understand it. When I worked there years ago, they had a 9U unit, with 96 G3's in it. The sheer processing power, was impressive.

[RObert I. Eachus @ Jan 16th 2006 11:45PM]

Someone asked why these systems are ruggedized. They will almost certainly be used for SAR (synthetic aperature radar). The problem/advantage of SAR is that the resolution depends more on processing power than on antenna size. So there is a lot of using SAR from satellites to do terrain mapping. (The data is transmitted to the ground where the computers are located.) But for SAR done from aircraft, it is much easier to have the radar on-board, and just store the processed data.



So what is high resolution SAR used for? Not for detecting enemy aircraft, by the time you figured out to the centimeter where they were, they would be somewhere else. No, the big advantage of high-resolution SAR is to make terrain maps then compute differences. For example, do a little extra processing to get rid of moving vehicles, and you can detect where IEDs have been placed along supply routes.

[jem @ Jan 17th 2006 6:51AM]

#2 paul, the reason why AMD or Intel aren't really worried about Cell is because Cell is not destined for home PCs they know they can't penetrate that market, and plus Cell is not on the x86 platform meaning programming for this thing will be a bitch and a half, so there won't be enough support from everyday programmers to switch to Cell from x86, only specialized industries like medical, military and games would devote such time to Cell.

[Chris @ Jan 17th 2006 12:46PM]

#14 Last I recall IBM released over 1,000 pages of info and kits to program the CBE from their website for any regular programmer to look into and use. It isn't x86 but it also isn't like something so foreign that programmers wouldn't have some familiarity with it.



People that know Vector programming already got a leg up on programming for this. Yes vector is a pain but you definatly can't deny the power it has against x86.