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Ascended_Saiyan3 on 15 April 2009
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Laffer said:
As a IT professional in Infrastructure and having implemented some HPC Clusters, the discussion must be separated into

1.) What is the better Console

and

2.) what is the better CPU


Point 1.) is much up to your personal preference and budget

but Point 2.) does not need to be discussed. IBM developped and manufactures both CPU's. The XBOX360 CPU was some sideproduct of the Cell and Power development. IBM never used this CPU further or used it for any new development.
The Cell is absolutely the contrary. IBM is betting their future on Cell. The PS3 Cell Chip was part of their QS21 Blade Center (2 PowerCell with 8 GB Memory @ 3.2GHz).
The PowerCell8i was an improved version, now supporting Double Precision Floating Point natively in the SPU's and supporting up to 16 GB of DDR2 RAM (the QS22 Blade, 2 CPU, 32 GB DDR2 RAM)
The NextGen Cell will sport 4 Power6 Cores and 32!!! SPE's!!!
The processing Power will kill everything on this planet.

To compare DP FP Power:

PS3 Cell: with software approx 120 GFLOPS DP, 200 GFLOPS SP
PowerCell8i: 200 GFLOPS DP, 400 GFLOPS SP
ATI Radeon Firestream 9250 (HD 4870), 200 GFLOPS DP , 1200 GFLOPS SP

So the actuall PowerCell8i is matching with 8 SPU's already the fastest available Graphics board in Double Precision FP Ops.

IBM has still the issue with unleashing this incredible power, because software libraries optimized for Cell using SPE's are not available and hand coding is needed.

The Power7 Generation will just be a Cell processor.

Cell was the first mainstream hybrid processor, it is somehow the father of what AMD will do with the 1st FUSION Processor (Bulldozer) and where all allpurpose CPU will go... (like Intel's Sandy Bridge)

Cool!  I'm an IT guy as well (Enterprise Technology division of the company).

Yeah, I have the slide on the 4PPEs + 32 eSPEs.  The performance is suppose to be 1TFLOPs - SP  500GFLOPs - DP.

Some of the improvements to the SPEs.  The 4 PPEs/PPUs are suppose to be based on POWER7 technology, last I heard.  That was before they decided on 4 PPEs/PPUs.

I LOL'd at the line in bold.