That costs $200 by itself...

two ps3 duct taped is pure genius... is going to be powerful enough and will be cheaper to build... just upgrade the GPU and put 8X the RAM ps3 had...

-_-"

If they put 2GB of XDR2 on the current Cell and 1GB of GDDR5 on a new Nvidia 5xx GPU, they would be set.

For video processing GPUs can only really decode whatever is programmed in the hardware.  If a better encoding algorithm is created only a cpu will be able to decode it.  So having a powerful enough processor is a lot more flexible (Should you want to use different codecs or write your own.)

just how powerful will this cell be...

what is the stuff he said?

http://www.ps3today.com/Blogs/JournalBlogView/hqs/blr_129.aspx

This link has some comedic quotes from him, including this one about the Cell:

The model image for the Cell-based network may be the Internet: servers around the world form one virtual 'computer,' and each PC accesses it. Application programs can no longer directly access the hardware; instead they will have to be written in high-level, object-oriented language. The Cell processor will completely change the concept of programming. I am sure that a technology revolution is about to occur, not only within Sony but throughout the digital consumer electronics industry.”

Another one:

http://ramine.net/reblog-ken-kutaragis-best-quotes-sony/

whereas the present Internet mainly handles characters, applications on the Cell network will also handle semantics and reasoning.

well to be fair, i bet a lot of that stuff was possible and planned, but had to be severly stripped away becasue of costs.

just look at the ps3 they first released it cost $850 to make, just imagine how much it would have been if they put in everything they wanted.

hint: OVER 9000!!!!!!!!!!!

edit: reading more of his quotes he seems like Sony's Peter Molonex

Some of it was entirely impossible when the claims were made ...

In order to run something like a videogame using a distributed system you would need a very high bandwith and very low latency network connection between the systems that were working together. You could probably do something very impressive with a cluster of systems that were physically right next to eachother and connected through 1Gb/s lan connection, but it is (effectively) impossible to do anything meaningful over the internet.

There is one exception though, and when I thought about this (initially) I was depressed that none of the manufacturers used this approach. The vast majority of consoles spend the vast majority of their time sitting idle and you could create a P2P gaming network where idle systems acted as nodes and ran as dedicated servers for people who were playing a game. If you have multiple nodes that had a decent enough connection to each other, the load on that server could be split in such a way to maximize everyone's experience.