Has the Cell peaked? If no, would it work for next gen? - More questions inside

[Soleron]

HoloDust said:

DraconianAC said:
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Not sure about the price, but 2 Cells together are practiacally QS21 BladeCenter - and they give 460 GFLOPS peak performance - that's lower than GPU inside A10-5700 alone (584GFLOPS). It just doesn't make sense not to use todays GPUs when they offer way superior performance.

The Cell would fare much better than the GFLOPS number suggests. The GPU achieves this with a bunch of brute force FP units - they have very limited memory access and can't work together on one thread or take normal-looking code. It's like you have a computer on every asteroid in the solar system and they can only communicate by flashing a single LED to each other.

Cell was much more CPU-like in memory access, many fewer threads were needed.

Cell was good at FP-heavy normal code. Unfortuantely game computing is INT-heavy and game graphics work best on a GPU. It's still THE best at what it does best, but it was never suitable for a game console.

Also remember the Cell was designed at 90nm. We will have 28nm in 2013, which will have ~24x the transistor density and so 24x the performance. Allowing for losses, Sony could put 16 Cells for the PS4 CPU and still be able to sell it.