kars on 11 March 2007
CrazzyMan said:
next xbox has no chance against ps4, cause ps4 with 8-16 cell inside will beat everything.
Just now cell for ps3 is like prototype, the developers gonna find how to work best with cell, and on ps4 with such experience they will make mega power. 
Not really. In fact the cell caused some discussions in 2005 but since then it was generally realized, that the Cell is exactly what it was designed for: A special development for LowCost Cluster computing, with a rather low power consumption. What it is not is a kind of ÃœberProcessor, as it was sometimes described by Sony! It's weaknesses are a part of its design.
1: Instead of a unified cache it must work with its internal ring bus and the SPEs are in trouble if they can not work mostly in their own 512 KB of memory.
2: IO intensive applications can saturate its memory interface.
3: The SPEs are designed for single precission floats, not double precission floats, that are needed in most cluster applications.
Its limitations are more or less the same as in the days of the transputer hype more than 20 years ago. Although it is possible to write pürograms that do not obey Amdahl's Law (thanks to unified caches), its fundamentals are valid, and there are still no easy solutions for the problems of parallel programs, instead there are only solutions for special problems.
