| zarx said:
Cell is only better at certain things tho, sure it runs circles arround a traditional CPU in terms of raw flops but that doesn't really reflect all workloads. No one has really prioratised SIMD performance on x86 in a long time unless you count larrabee/Xenon Phi which were never meant to be used as a CPU successor but rather GPU/coprocessor to be used in conjunction with a traditional CPU. The CELL's asymetric CPU design seems to be dead, tho I suppose including a GPU on the same die as the CPU could be seen as a successor to that design. I don't see anyone using 2 different types of CPU cores in the same die tho, that design did seem to be a dead end or at least one that IBM didn't think was worth pursuing. So far in terms of heterogeneous compute GPU bassed design does seem to be winning the war but they are still a very far away from the point where you could do away with traditional CPU cores in a console let alone a PC. CPUs aren't replacing dedicated GPU any time soon ether, Intel and AMD have instead gone for the aproach of just including a GPU on the same die (with the option of an addon card) rather than try to do graphics on CPU cores. Maybe in 10 years we will see a new architecture that really does offer the ultimate balance of flexibility and performance that lets it supersede the current CPU+GPU paradime for games, but not this generation. |
The better things are the things that slow processors down. I mean, not like typing a word document is gonna kill your processor or browsing a webpage. Only thing it's more poor in that would matter is A.I. but they had to sacrifice branching to get the parallel processing working. Asymetric design will never be dead, GPUs are an example of this (Not even talking about APUs). And like I said GPUs and CPUs are converging, never said it would be anytime soon.
