[FFmpeg-devel] Optimizations for Cell Broadband Engine

[John Kelley]

On 5/7/07, Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri <barbieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/7/07, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 02:30:30PM +0200, Guillaume Poirier wrote:
> > > Hello folks,
> > >
> > > There's been several people on this mailing list wondering if there
> > > were any plans to write optimizations for Cell Broadband Engine, with
> > > not much luck since now.
> > > A few days ago, I've been contacted by a person working at IBM who's
> > > offering to give one PS3 (maybe more than one, I don't know) to
> > > someone who would be interested to write such optimizations.
> > > In case any of you is interested, please contact me, and I'll forward
> > > your application to this person.
> >
> > can the ps3 be connected to the net?
>
> Yes, both ethernet and Wifi
>
> > can sshd be installed on it?
>
> Sure, it allows you to install Linux without any trouble. Gentoo,
> Fedora and Ubuntu are known to run fine. It's a powerpc with 2
> execution threads, that's why it's easy.
>
> Problem is to use its SPUs, AFAIR they're exported to userspace as a
> filesystem where you have dirs mapping to SPU and internally the
> mailbox, register, ... so requires another offloading logic.
>
>
> > if yes to both, then i would suggest that these be done and everyone
> > who is interrested from ffmpeg/x264/xine/mplayer/xvid/vlc/...
> > could get an account to port, test and benchmark their code on it
> >
> > that of course doesnt awnser who would physically get the ps3 or admin
> > it
>
> Given IBM's size and interest on cell being widely used, I do think
> that they can ship one or more PS3 to each interested developer, given
> that it's a well known and committed developer. If you or any other
> core hacker is interested, just let them know.
>
> --
> Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
> --------------------------------------
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>

We've been working on some general optimisations in #ps3dev on
irc.freenode.net, so far we have an optimised CSC algo that runs at
around 700fps at 720P using one SPU and also a bilinear scaler that
runs at around 70fps at 720P right now (needs some more optimisations)
and I've been working on an optimised 8x8 iDCT for the SPU but so far
have only had the spare time to implement the row operations but not
the cloumns.

The problem with developing over the net on the PS3 is that developing
with SPUs can lock up the machine under certain circumstances leaving
you with a PS3 that needs to be hard rebooted.

Don't worry about SPUfs, as long as you have support compiled into the
kernel and the mount point mounted using libspu2 in your code will do
everything else for you.

Cheers,
John