What is a Synergistic Processing Element / SPE
Written by Abhishek Ghosh
Each SPE is composed of a "Synergistic Processing Unit", SPU, and a "Memory Flow Controller", MFC (DMA, MMU, and bus interface). An SPE is a RISC processor with 128-bit SIMD organization for single and double precision instructions. With the current generation of the Cell, each SPE contains a 256 KiB embedded SRAM for instruction and data, called "Local Storage" (not to be mistaken for "Local Memory" in Sony's documents that refer to the VRAM) which is visible to the PPE and can be addressed directly by software. Each SPE can support up to 4 GiB of local store memory. The local store does not operate like a conventional CPU cache since it is neither transparent to software nor does it contain hardware structures that predict which data to load.
















Comments