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Forums - Gaming - will cell ever be used in desktop computers?

Soleron on 13 July 2008

x86 and derivatives will never be replaced. The chance of it happening is the same as Windows being replaced by an alternative.

Intel tried to replace x86 with Itanium (and even had Microsoft's support for it)... and failed because AMD extended x86 to 64-bit.

The ISA used in the Cell (POWER-based) has been around for a long time and Microsoft hasn't shown any sign of switching - if Microsoft doesn't endorse your CPU architecture then you have zero chance of entering the desktop, as long as Windows is the dominant platform.

If we had an open OS like Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, etc. then a PC manufacturer could sell PCs with a different CPU ISA and all of the applications ported to that ISA because their source code is open. Again, since a closed-source OS is dominant...

As for the Cell as an add-on chip, it will be replaced by GPGPU (CTM, OpenCL, CUDA, Larrabee etc.).



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dbot on 13 July 2008

I don't think the Cell was ever intended for mass market deployment. It is not the best architecture for general purpose computing. You may see some niche uses for it in workstations or in research oriented lines.



Thanks for the input, Jeff.

 

 

masterb8tr on 13 July 2008

i've seen one in a laptop.



IllegalPaladin on 13 July 2008
thekitchensink said:
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?

 

lol yea, Gabe Newell and Valve already hate developing on the PS3.



Viper1 on 13 July 2008

As a desktop CPU...never. It's simply not designed for that market space.

The Cell BE is basically an in-order processor while todays processors from Intel and AMD are out-of-order processors. This would make the Cell BE very inefficient for many common CPU tasks.



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