baka on 24 February 2007
Well, this thread is about CPU power. CPUs are an area of interest for me, at least, and the Cell has a particularly interesting architecture. It's at least as interesting as the Altivec and SSE SIMD instructions found in the G4 and x86 chips respectively. Certainly it can play games, the Z80 and 6502 played games, but this processor handles several programs executing at the same time, with their own RAM on chip. Even if most of the chips are lightweight compliments to the primary core, it provides good horizontal scalability assuming the code can be parallelized appropriately. That's good for computation at least, how good it will truly be for games (which have typically not been highly threaded in the past) remains to be seen.
