Ray Tracing on the Cell Processor Carsten Benthin† Ingo Wald Michael Scherbaum† Heiko Friedrich‡ †inTrace Realtime Ray Tracing GmbH SCI Institute, University of Utah ‡Saarland University {benthin, scherbaum}@intrace.com,
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract band”) architectures1 to hide memory latencies, at exposing par- Over the last three decades, higher CPU performance has been allelism through SIMD units, and at multi-core architectures. At achieved almost exclusively by raising the CPU’s clock rate. Today, least for specialized tasks such as triangle rasterization, these con- the resulting power consumption and heat dissipation threaten to cepts have been proven as very powerful, and have made modern end this trend, and CPU designers are looking for alternative ways GPUs as fast as they are; for example, a Nvidia 7800 GTX offers of providing more compute power. In particular, they are looking 313 GFlops [16], 35 times more than a 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron towards three concepts: a streaming compute model, vector-like CPU. Today, there seems to be a convergence between CPUs and SIMD units, and multi-core architectures. One particular example GPUs, with GPUs—already using the streaming compute model, of such an architecture is the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture SIMD, and multi-core—become increasingly programmable, and (CBEA), a multi-core processor that offers a raw compute power CPUs are getting equipped with more and more cores and stream- of up to 200 GFlops per 3.2 GHz chip. The Cell bears a huge po- ing functionalities. Most commodity CPUs already offer 2–8 tential for compute-intensive applications like ray tracing, but also cores [1, 9, 10, 25], and desktop PCs with more cores can be built requires addressing the challenges caused by this processor’s un- by stacking and interconnecting smaller multi-core systems (mostly conventional architecture.