What is the difference between the 'Cell' and other current processor types?

I hope i asked that question so it makes sense...

Thanks

The Cell has the power to take over the world. It's more alive than you are.

Ah...so i was right !

^ hilarious

i think its something to do with the architecture, but im not too sure.

 yep .. old man power.

it has a couple of blind cores that only crunch numbers, but do it extremely well, and a regular core that gives out instructions, organizes the results, and does some spare calculations.

normal cores can do a lot of things, so the blind cores have a lot stripped away.

that is of course if its running perfectly and is also a very rough take on it. neither really do it too much justice.

- More processors on one chip. 8 of which used on the PS3, newer chips sport more processors on a chip.
- Each processor has its own relative large amount of dedicated memory operating at cache-like speeds (fast, efficient) each with its own DMA controller, each SPEs acts as an independent system-on-a-chip of its own. Allowing them to operate far more asynchronously (efficient).
-Very high internal bandwidth, data is moved around a ring amongst the SPEs. Good for streaming.

The design is very modern and innovative. Some non-crucial legacy stuff has been removed from the PPE and even more so with regard to the SPEs (which requires devs at this point to do more manually, but is far more efficient and powerful). So this design requires a lot of redesign regarding legacy software to take advantage of, but doing so yields better results on other multi-processor or multi-core architectures as well but to a lesser extend.

Thanks Mike B and SoccerDrew,
one more question though...
'SPE' whats that stand for?

until now we didnt see this Cell power in any game.

Synergistic Processing Elements.

Cell processor has 8 of them, one of them disabled for better yields. 1 reserved by the OS, leaving developers with 6. As said above, they are single precision number crunching little god boxes. much like 3d cards with vertex/shader fragment programs, each SPE has its own standalone program that you send to the SPE (with parameters, ie data or pointer to data) run and pull the result out.. the PPE (Power Processor Element) basically manages the SPE's and the data sent too and recieved from each SPE unit.. the PPE is a almost standard PowerPC processor with SMT (think hyperthreading that existed in pentium 4's on PC).

The annoying side with SPE's is that you have a 256KB limit for obth the SPE program code and its data (shared).. Resistance:fall of man developers developed since nice tricks to combat that limit .. but lets go there another day :)