games use just 10% of ps3's power + CELL benchmarks

[baka]

Jack said:baka the cell is designed to do DSP work I think it can do some video preprocessing before it is shipped to the GPU that is the plan anyways. Companies are never done with their compilers they are always finding ways to improve things, but at this time they do have one out. IBM would not handle the video game side of the Cell Sony is suppose to do the "compiler". IBM chip designer will talk to developers on how to better use the cell though.

They're really just lightweight processors, a DSP is not entirely dissimilar in that respect. However, a DSP is intended to take an input signal and apply a function, given the desired parameters. The Cell processor's SPU components are capable of running more fully featured programs on data, although everything has to fit in the SPU's local RAM. If an SPU program tries to use the PS3's main RAM while processing, it's going to be waiting a long time (for a processor.) That's not a very good use of the SPUs' processing power. As far as the compiler goes, IBM has indeed been developing their compiler for the Cell for quite some time, necessary due to the unusual architecture of the chip. It's called the Octopiler. Very interesting stuff, as it has to somehow determine what should go to an SPU and send the appropriate code, all at the compilation phase. This isn't work that Sony's going to want to take on by themselves without at least IBM's code as a starting point. Take a look at the following URLs if you have some familiarity with how compilers and processors work: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.index.html In particular, there's a nice discussion at the following URL as to how they intend to parallelize instructions at compiler time: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/cellcompiler.simd.html