joeorc said:
me..have no idea what i am taliking about? that's rich. the Cell processor is a stream processor, pure and simple that's a fact. gimped core's. god you are just as thick as the "if it's not x86" is crap for game's. that very way of thinking is what stunt's growth in computing. you have a one track mind my friend just stop. while i respect you I do not happen to agree with your take on how and which processor is classed in your IDEA what a stream processor is or is not. |
The Cell processor from STI, an alliance of Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba Corporation, and IBM, is a hardware architecture that can function like a stream processor with appropriate software support. It consists of a controlling processor, the PPE (Power Processing Element, an IBM PowerPC) and a set of SIMD coprocessors, called SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements), each with independent program counters and instruction memory, in effect a MIMD machine. In the native programming model all DMA and program scheduling is left up to the programmer. The hardware provides a fast ring bus among the processors for local communication. Because the local memory for instructions and data is limited the only programs that can exploit this architecture effectively either require a tiny memory footprint or adhere to a stream programming model. With a suitable algorithm the performance of the Cell can rival that of pure stream processors, however this nearly always requires a complete redesign of algorithms and software.
He is right. It is NOT a stream processor. It can only act like one with very complicated and reworked software support. True stream processors combined in mass in the structure of say a GPU will always be superior to the Cell unless the Cell structure were to add more PPE and LOTS more SPEs.
And I have no idea where you even got this "if it's not x86 its crap for games" statement. When was this even something people believed? 5 years ago? x64 is clearly the best choice for pretty much anything within the last few years and from this point on. Or perhaps this statement is so foreign and aged that I do not know what exactly it is referring to?