| bdbdbd said: If the SPE's had been something more of general purpose, they hadn't been cheap and it couldn't have had the high floating point operations per second number, but maybe it had been a lot easier for the programmers. |
Exactly it was a trade off.
We need to remember the geometry sizes these chips were initially being built at, which was by modern standards massively huge.
So in order to keep costs down, the cores needed to be simple and "stupid".
| bdbdbd said: ARM appears to have been slightly faster in 05-06 than I previously stated. Actually ARM's been used by smartphones since 04 (or 03?), but yeah, the smartphones rocketed the ARM development. |
Modern ARM chips seem to resemble a big and wide x86 core these days, especially Apple's CPU design.
Back then they had more in common to a narrow and slow Atom core.
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