Toshiba is now backing PS3.

[LordTheNightKnight]

Game_boy said:

LordTheNightKnight said:

 

The PS3's Cell is just one version. One could easily be made for PCs, where the main core is x86.

Firstly, Cell is POWER based. That cannot be changed. Secondly, if you want to change the instruction set architecture, every single part of the chip needs a redesign. Thirdly, software needs to be enttirely rewritten to support asymmetric multiprocessing, and it doesn't offer as much usable potential as symmetric multiprocessing did. Fourthly, the Cell's SPUs are in a modified POWER that is very efficient in vector operations. If these were changed to x86 cores, their speed advantages would be entirely lost. You'd need to persuade software manufacturers to write half their code in x86 and half in a vector form of it. Finally, and this is the clincher, Sony and Toshiba do not have x86 licenses, so any such microprocessors would be illegal. Whether IBM's x86 license is legal is questionable.

The closest it will come for x86 (and therefore Windows) systems is AMD's APU initiative codenamed "Fusion" that places x86 and graphics (you could say the instruction set is abstracted using DirectX or OpenGL) cores on one silicon wafer. While ATI's R700 is looking good on the graphics side, AMD's Phenom (K10) is losing heavily to Intel's Core 2 (Core "Penryn"). Intel's Larabee which aims for x86 yet vector-efficient cores is also possible.

So, no.

The PS3's specific Cell processor is based on a Power PC chip. If IBM wanted to make a variant of the Cell that would work on Windows, they would do it. So what if the instruction set had to be rewritten. Would that magically change the structure of the Cell?