http://www.mcvuk.com/news/28847/Sony-to-abandon-the-Cell , I guess its this one.

 Local store=cache?

Without memory you cant do anything so yah, 256kb is a realy low amount to work with when it has to contain all instructions for the SPE to fetch.

Retrasado already set you straight quote and all a few posts up.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6182641.html

They pulled out of R&D, sold of their factories, anounced that they wont be using it in any of their products except for the PS3(when previously it was to power everything from cellphones to TV`s to fridges, be used as accelerators for PC`s etcetera) so yeah surely they must be putting it in the PS4 then.

yup they sold it but not like it's a big deal. Now they can at least concentrate on what they are meant to be doing. Producing good software for the hyped ps3 that hopefully can make some extra good use of the cell.

@Fishie - I back my posts up with facts not made up shit.

Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs)

Each Cell contains 8 SPE's(7 SPE'sfor PS3)

An SPE is a self contained vector processor which acts as an independent processor. They each contain 128 x 128 bit registers, there are also 4 (single precision) floating point units capable of 32 GigaFLOPS* and 4 Integer units capable of 32 GOPS (Billions of integer Operations per Second) at 4GHz. The SPEs also include a small 256 Kilobyte local store instead of a cache. According to IBM a single SPE (which is just 15 square millimetres and consumes less than 5 Watts at 4GHz) can perform as well as a top end (single core) desktop CPU given the right task.



*This is counting Multiply-Adds which count as 2 instructions, hence 4GHz x 4 x 2 = 32 GFLOPS(PS3 Cell runs at 3.2GHz)

32 X 8 SPE's = 256 GFLOPS
32 X 7 SPE's = 224 GFLOPS(PS3 Cell)


Like the PPE the SPEs are in-order processors and have no Out-Of-Order capabilities. This means that as with the PPE the compiler is very important. The SPEs do however have 128 registers and this gives plenty of room for the compiler to unroll loops and use other techniques which largely negate the need for OOO hardware.

http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell1_v2.html

And 16Kb for instructions. (Registers)

SPEs also must fetch data from main mem to local store and work there. They can't work in main mem.

@ Fishie

Beyond3D staffer: "People don't seem to realize how much 256 KB is, in this age of 1/2 GB RAM - there's no context. 256 KB is as much as the original Amiga launched with; a computer that could do graphics, word-processing, music editing, ray-tracing etc. It's memory was limiting, mostly because you didn't have much room for data. There weren't any applications it couldn't do due to lack of room for code."

He's right, graphics and audio data was a concern as they are usually much larger than the executable code. The Cell's SPEs are however designed to stream process such data.

Everything had to fit in this memory of early model Amigas, the OS, the game engine, graphics, audio, etc. And loading things from double density 3.5 diskettes was slow (totally unlike the enormous bandwidth available within the Cell). But there are excellent examples that amazing things could be accomplished.

Just think about how many pages of optimised code you will have to write to fill 100 KB for just one SPE.

guys iam busy now so i willback later to check the posts so ... take ur time posting.