I know nothing about spe's, I know nothing about the cell, I know nothing about coding or anything like that. I can only tell you what I can see from the video. How is this relivant in anyway to prove how well the PS3 is going to perform in a persons house out of the box. Where is there a practical application for this as it pertains to the PS3 in it's present state? This guy is evidently some kind of super wizz and has linked up 3 PS3s so that he could render a single car on a screen. The games that are being developed are not being made to take advantage of 3 PS3s stacked on top of each other. To say that this is revealing applications for the PS3 in the future is a moot point as well, just due to the fact that the Cell was obsolete the day it came off the drawing board. That is just the nature of electronics. They are always making it faster, smaller, cheaper, better. This is nothing more than some guy trying to develop his skills so that he can get a job working for some research and development team someday. To make it into some kind of prop for the "Power of the Cell!" is pretty ridiculous.

 Think? That's a fact my friend, as far as I remember, the game biz is worth more and generates more revenue than the movie and music industry combined! Not counting porn of course...

Yeah and if you want to see soehing more impressive wait until the Firestream 9170 comes out of course it is only 2000 grand for the GPGPU

This video uses 14 Cell processors, and all 14 of them have all 8 SPEs available (they're on Blade servers, not PS3s).

for the first video :

1/ so are they using 6 SPE or all SPE ? EDIT : ok for all SPE !!

2/ sorry Dolla Dolla but,
this sentence :
"""so in total, 14 SPEs are doing raytracing to produce a 720p image with 4x supersampling. """
doesn't help me much to know WHAT IS RAYTRACING ?

The graphics might look good. The sounds sucks big time. for someone thsi good with technology, they really didnt record the voice well.

It's a special kind rendering that makes things like reflections super realistic because it simulates how your eyes work in real life... I think.  As opposed to regular rendering where everything is simulated from the point of light.

Bottom line is, that if the ps3 didnt have a graphics card it can manage PS1 graphics which is VERY impressive.

Leo... just... stop. Please. My old Pentium 3 550 MHz could manage better than PS1 graphics without a video card. Stop trying to win the argument and start trying to learn something.

Raytracing is essentially shooting a ray out form every pixel on the screen to one or more light sources.  It's a very parallel and very math heavy process.

Rasterized graphics that you see in today's games use "translations" of the 3D coordinate plane to a flat 2D plane.  Once you place the object in your virtual 3D space, you apply filters and effects to the objects 2D representation.

Kasz216 is close in saying that Raytracing is basically like how your eyes work (but in reverse.)  Your eye accepts light coming from and reflecting off anything.  Raytracing is reversing that step and only rendering what your eye (viewport) can see [most of the time.]