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sc94597 said:
What that benchmark tells us is that the Cell's architecture was designed to have certain special purpose features (similar to that of a GPU.) For general-purpose tasks (which is what CPU's are designed for) the Jaguar is very much the superior processor. The Cell (and to a lesser extent Xenon) were designed to maximize floating point operation performance (flops) at the cost of pretty much everything else, it makes sense that it would somewhat outperform the Jaguar when it comes to GPU Benchmarks.
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The Cell has a ton of architectural hindrance's that limit it's potential.
It favours bandwidth over latency for one, SPE's can only access it's own scratchpad memory and not the memory of other SPE's.
The SPE's are also only dual-issue, in-order designs, there is no branch predictors and will thus heavily rely on compilers.
In essence, the Cell falters compared to proper CPU designs in many tasks... And for Floating Point Heavy scenario's, a GPU is better anyway.
Sony advertised the Cell as some kind of powerhouse and made people believe it was some kind of super computer in a chip, the Cell was a transistor conservative design on an older fabrication process to offer good performance at a low price.
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The SPU's can do everything a "normal" cpu can do. They are as fast on integer as they are on fp. They are just extremely simple or "dumb" in comparison to a modern cpu core (In-Order, no branch prediction, etc...). That's what's making them so fast and so hard to code for. You can (partly) optimize against these "flaws", but this takes time and is worsen by the fact that your normal pc codebase doesn't care about them.
You can't really say "this" is better then "that" without taking in to account difficulty to code for. It doesn't matter if one is 50% "stronger" than another if the bulk of developers can't write code well enough to show that advantage.
In Short Cell Is weaker to Kabini because of generation gap. But still you cannot compare them.
