Cell

[caeteez]

Does anyone have any idea how long it will be before the Cell Processor hits the PC market, or if it will at all?

I remember hearing talk from IBM that it will be in use in most electronic devices at some time in the future.

If it does come into PC use, how much quicker is it than todays Intel Quad?

Cheers, just interested.

 

[Mattus]

It won't reach the PC without some serious modification, because it's not an x86 processor so it can't run any applications compiled for the x86 architecture, ie. practically everything.

Think of Cell as somewhere between a modern CPU and a GPU. The GPU can complete the most operations the fastest, but the operations it can carry out are very limited. A CPU can't process instructions anywhere near as quickly as a modern GPU, but it's much more versatile.

The Cell sits somewhere in the middle.

 

[Ender]

the cell (i might be wrong) uses a number of spu's and one core processor. The Spu's are incredible number crunchers, but thats all they can do. As a result all the programs would have to be compiled to run with them , this could only be achieved for a start if the cell was modified to become a x86 processor (ie what all windows cpu's are )

 

[hiroofheroes]

Cells wouldn't be very good cpu's but could make a nice add in card/co processor for physics/targetted apps. Economies of scale would suggest that a cell based add in card could be made for relatively cheap too ( at least compared to physX cards).

 

[Ender]

Problem is it would have a very limited user base, and without lots of support by developers it would be useless (look at ageia physic x and how unsuccessful that has been) plus the pci slot lacks the bandwidth i would reckon to utilize the cell processor. Therefore it would have to be in a pci-e slot, which in turn further limits its use.

 

[hiroofheroes]

PciE/PciE-2 plus dedicated high bandwidth memory would be a neccessity for the cell, which relies on throughput on data to make up its performance.

 

[Sinny]

from what i know the cell doesnt have any cache as said before it just calculates, even though its 8 cores sound appealing they will not be utilised for quite some time as even now their isnt many programs for 2 cores.

i expect sony to put them in their media products and portable media devices but not pc's.

 

[Perfect_Chaos]

Cell isnt as good as "ps3 fanboys" make it out to be imo.

 

[Si MPS]

you're more likely to see it in servers than home pc's tbh

 

[hiroofheroes]

Cell isnt as good as "ps3 fanboys" make it out to be imo.

The cell is great at media processing - orders of magnitude better than an intel or amd cpu, but pretty pap at general computing tasks.

A cell would make a great co-processor, but not neccesarily even a good general purpose processor.