Intel already has planned a 62 way processor add on that doubles as a video card. AMD has many plans of it's own to integrate multiple CPU's and GPU's onto the same chip. X86 is here to stay. Cell will be forgotten once the PS3 stops being made. However the PPC chip that the Cell is based on will live on in various forms.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/05/09/toshiba_cell_strategy/

Are my posts blocked or something?

x86 is just an ISA. So is POWER. x86 is terrible but intel and amd couldn't kill it even if they wanted to. Which incidentally they do.

@alucardremixed you can already buy a power6 system clocked at 4.7 so..

@DarkNight_DS Larrabee is basically the same class of micro-architecture as the cell.

It all depends. If there is a movement within Apple, Sony, and Google (they all seem to be sleeping in a similar bed) to move to that platform, than yes, we can definetely see it.

YES cell is used in a toshiba laptop
its called spur engine and its used to decode multiple HD movies at once showing it in small windows.

toshiba have HD TVS and now a notebook with it.

Dear god, I hope it doesn't become mainstream. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's a very capable piece of hardware. That said, can you imagine the anarchy with software developers (not just game developers) who have been programming a certain way for twenty years suddenly have to completely relearn everything they knew in order to make products for the mass market?

Multi core is the future.  The Cell will always be ahead of X86.  Also x86 is pretty archaic.  I have read some pretty interesting news however.

There is an initiative to have a program that runs X86 code and dynamically convert it into cleaner, streamlined, and more efficient code for cell to read.  Essentially acting as a translator.

not unless unbunto or windows supports it

though apple has an os that could run on it with some retooling, and beefing up of the main core to reinclude all powerpc parts

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).

I say nay. CELL is basically like CPU/GPU, if you have both of those you really don't need CELL.

@mikeB osx has been designed to run multicore as well back from its days at nextstep. the current version does know how to optimise system tasks by dumping between cpus.

the bigger problem with cell is the dedication that the spes require. as i have stated before alvetec for powerpc was very similar tech great payoff if used right, but hardly anyone outside of apple and adobe did.

and i do agree x86 is a bad chip design but saddly it will take ms moving to a new chip arch to change anything, even then it would take years.

i do support a return to the powerpc design