IBM continues Cell development

[joeorc]

here is a system architect at AMD states what a STREAMING PROCESSOR IS:

GPUs can act like a stream processor, but can go beyond a pure stream processor. The best working definition I think I can give is that a streaming processor must name all the elements it will access for each kernel invocation and it executes the same kernel across a stream of elements, often in a data parallel fashion (but a streaming processor can be serial). Others in the field might give you a slightly different variation, and if you ask a DSP guy, they will likely give you yet another definition. Wikipedia also has a version of this definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_processing) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU). Other people view 'Stream Processing' as SIMD (much like a variant of vector processing, but without the 1 in 1 out restriction) as the DSP folks do where I tend to have a more relaxed view that it is SPMD.

When I say 'name elements' I mean that all the data can be localized before each kernel invocation or the data can be prefetched in time for execution. Where GPUs differ is that within the execution on an element you can calculate address to gather from, i.e. they can change what the access based on the data they are processing. Where things get really blury is that for GPUs to even run, you have to already localize data into the GPUs memory or into system addressable memory.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=38016