A Comparative Xeon and CBE Performance Analysis

The Cell Broadband Engine is a high performance multicore processor with superb performance on certain types of problems. However, it does not perform as well running other algorithms, particularly those with heavy branching. The Intel Xeon processor is a high performance superscalar processor. It utilizes a high clock speed and deep pipelines to help it achieve superior performance. But deep pipelines can perform poorly with frequent memory accesses. This paper is a study and attempt at quantifying the types of programmatic structures that are more suitable to a particular architecture. It focuses on the issues of pipelines, memory access and branching on these two microprocessor architectures