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

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torok said:

Pemalite said:

Cell is only better than Jaguar at some floating point, there are different types. - And even then it will only beat the base Xbox One and Playstation 4, the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X will still win in even single precision.

I'll point you to my post which has the explanation on it all.
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8674270

Good post there. I would only add (for the people that think Cell is a 9-core CPU) that Cell has a single core plus 8 SPEs that are SIMD. They are not comparable to regular MIMD CPU cores and are way more limited. Like GPUs, they excel at specific tasks that are parallel.So, the correct comparison is the SPEs against GPUs, a scenario where they are massively outperformed.

The closest thing we have to Cell nowadays is the Xeon Phi line by Intel (and that's quite different anyway).

I also think people are missing the point. IBM, Sony and Toshiba reportedly invested US$ 400M on Cell development. It's insane for Sony to expend that much every gen just to R&D the CPU of their consoles when they can get a off-the-shelf part with zero research cost. Unlike Intel or AMD, Sony isn't on the CPU business, they better expend their money researching stuff that is directly connected to the console itself. Last gen they poured billions in R&D and lost tons of money. This gen, they had lower R&D costs and actually got way more money in the end.

It's ridiculous to think they will return to the strategy that was almost making them go bankrupt instead of sticking with the current approach that basically saved the company. Even MS, that was less successful, still profited with the X1. These companies are in to make money, not to try to develop magical processors that will unlock secret superpowers.

The Cell was intended to give IBM/Sony/Toshiba a dent at the HPC market, with the PS3 acting as poster-boy. But it got ridiculously clear that Nvidia got the advantage with their GPUs. Even Intel is suffering to push the Xeon Phi (that beats Tesla at task parallelism), simply because devs are already to invested on the CUDA mindset and most HPC applications have awesome libraries that support CUDA (TensorFlow, etc).

I think each of the three had their own interests, as to my knowledge, Sony was planning on putting Cell on every home electronics device it was to manufacture. Linux kernel was ported on Cell, so someone was clearly planning it on HPC and servers and such.