Yay, once again nobody knows what they are talking about.
@ All those who think cell was designed as a "server" chip.
The thing a SPE's are not good at are running what they used to call "ring 0" instructions back in the DOS days. These are things that happen alot when you do things like oh say opening a socket. But then again what kind of server would need to do that alot, so I guess you're right.
Anyhow everything is going to be in userspace as we are all going to be running mircokernels anyday now, right?
The cell is hard to program for because there is no cache-coherency between SPEs. This used to be the norm back in the Super-Mini days but single chips kept increasing in clock speed and the age of super computers died.
Well things have come full circle. They can't keep increasing clockspeed w/o assigning a nuclear generator to each house and they can't keep increasing the number of cores and maintain cache-coherency.
@Profcrab
There is a reason our research group bought a cluster of PS3s for our simulations. The reason the games aren't out is because 1) is today's average industry programmer is not what he/she used to be and 2) Sony released way before they were ready, there was such a shortage of cell chips none of the library developers could get ahold of them. The linux on cell group manager at IBM told me even they had trouble getting their hands on systems and this was last summer.
