will cell ever be used in desktop computers?

[MikeB]

Hopefully some day using an even more powerful version of the Cell (hopefully used well beyond just a co-operating setup).

However the most common operating systems sport horribly obsolete core designs (MacOS, Linux, Windows) making them not very suitable for achieving great multi-processor setup gains. They only support multi-core externally for 3rd party applications to take advantage of.

But for example take Windows, applications like Word or Outlook take no advantage of multiple cores, let alone lower levels of the OS itself. However Adobe Photoshop does, as well as many modern games.

There was a desktop OS once which was designed for running on multiple CPUs from the ground up, it was called BeOS. Sadly it was too far ahead of its time, in the mid nineties they launched a (mostly developer orientated) platform with multiple CPUs. Later on when Apple halted BeOS' progress on Mac systems, the OS was ported over to x86. But both mainstream hardware solutions were still single processor solutions, so BeOS couldn't really show off what it was worth on such architectures (other than its efficiency and many unique Amiga inspired features). Due to Microsoft monopolistic measures this prevented them to deal with big PC clone companies, the former billion dollar company eventually bankrupted under the pressure.

From a technological perspective it would be best to start over creating a new desktop OS taking a BeOS or QNX Neutrino like kernel and build up from there. Finally leave all that legacy bagage behind and implemented the software and OS with the best approaches we have learned over all those years.

Sadly achieving easy/cheap backwards compatibility and thus taking a lot legacy bagage on the trip has always been an obstruction for moving the computing industry forward through revolutionary leaps rather small evolutionary steps ever since the 80s (in the 80s it was still possible to release a radically new platform without having to worry too much about legacy software libraries and nor was there such comlex driver related issues).