Talk:PPE

POWER9 PPE vs Cell PPE

To have two small cores, both in Power processors, both made by IBM, sharing an acronym sounds like more than a coincidence to me. Is it possible that the Programmable PowerPC-lite Engines in the POWER9 are somehow related to the Power Processing Element in Cell and other architectures? - Torpcoms (talk) 12:37, 9 January 2018 (CST)

That's a question I asked too when "ppe42" came on my radar, but when I got it confirmed that the OCC in P9 is pretty much identical to the OCC in P8, i.e. 405 based, the answer is simple: No. ppe42 and Cell-PPE have essentially one thing in common: they are both PowerPC/Power Architecture processors. Implementation wise the 405 and Cell-PPE have very little in common.

405 is a simple classic PowerPC Book-E core, 32-bit, 5-stage pipeline, basic branch predictor, I- and D- L1 caches and FPU are optional. IBM's most basic and simple PowerPC core.

Cell-PPE is a 64-bit (PowerISA 2.05), 2-way multithreaded in-order core, 23 stage long pipeline, with FPU and AltiVec/VMX, advanced branch predictor (subject to Spectre/Meltdown) and a large L2 cache. It's closest sibling might probably be the POWER6 core.

- Henriok (talk) 05:41, 1 February 2018 (CST)