crumas2 on 30 July 2009
| Procrastinato said: Crumas2 is merely looking at the comparison from a more abstract, more "common user" based viewpoint. I actually stated in my post that a quadcore general purpose processor would be far superior to the Cell for general purpose computing, because its running widely varying tasks in parallel, as opposed to trying to accomplish a single task with parallelism. But we're not talking about general purpose computing. We're talking about games, which are often realtime simulations, with a lot of embarrassingly parallel ("embarrassingly parallel" is a computer science term for algorithms which are blatently made parallel... I'm not trying to make any feel bad here) work to be had. Thus, the Cell is clearly a good selection for such a use, once the hurdles of understanding how it works are behind you. Presumably, you could have a 8 core cell, and a 4-core general purpose CPU, which cost about the same to make (in identical mass-produced circumstances), but the Cell would beat the socks off the quad core for gaming purposes. That's my point, and its the only one I'm trying to make. Crumas, as I said, is approaching it from a more practical business standpoint, which I think is totally valid, in this day and age. I don't think that those ideas will necessarily hold true in the future, however, as performance parallel computing concepts become more mainstream. |
This is a very good post. As I've stated time and again in this thread, I believe the Cell is a very powerful (and I'll add groundbreaking) CPU... I just think the buzz words people use to describe it sometimes don't accurately reflect what the Cell is really about.
