Why Sony should also use a Cell Processor for PS5 (x86+Cell coprocessor)

[nemo37]

The only valid reason that I see would be for backwards compatibility, and even then I don't think it would be worth it. The PPE portion of the Cell can in no way compete with the Jaguar cores, and the SPE portion has been succeeded by general purpose programable GPUs (GPGPU)

1. Integer performance and IPC on Jaguar far surpasses the Cell. Jaguar also has much better power consumption as well.

2. The SPEs were designed for highly paralyzed operations, that is why certain tests might have cell coming up on top by a very marginal amount (and I would even question that marginal amount, because the test might have been better optimized for Cell than Jaguar). The problem is that modern programmable GPUs are far better optimized for those tasks than something like the SPEs ever where. Cell and its SPEs were designed in an era where GPUs were only starting to become more general purpose but were still very limited in how they could be programmed, as such highly parallelized operations would still run on CPUs (which were not designed for these types of operations and hence would run slowly) much of the time; Cell provided a stop-gap solution through the SPEs, but that solution is no longer necessary since such operations run way faster on the GPU.

3. Because the SPEs have been superseded by general purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) that portion (and according to you the key portion of the Cell) are no longer needed, which just leaves the woefully out of date PPE that has been surpassed by the Jaguar cores in every single way (look at point 1). The Cell provides absolutely no benefits in this day and age. Also, no programmer is going to take their parallelized code out of the GPU (where the code has most likely been optimized to run on multiple platforms and runs better than it ever could on a CPU or even something like the Cell's SPEs) and rewrite it so that it would run slower on the SPEs and no longer be applicable to any other platform.