jetrii said:
Negative. The cell processor was never designed to be a CPU/GPU hybrid. From day one, it was designed to be CPU with an unprecedented ability to rip through floating point operations. Remember, IBM planned to sell the Cell CPU on servers and supercomputers. Having it be a GPU hybrid would have made it more expensive to produce without any real benefits. Although CPUs suck at rendering, Sony hoped the Cell processor would be so powerful that although it's extremely inefficient at rendering, it could handle the task without breaking a sweat. If you remember, the original Cell processor patent had over 16 cores and was clocked at 5Ghz. Even if the original plan worked, the Cell wouldn't be able to compete with a modern GPU at the time. Sony made a bad business decision and it bit them in the ass so they had to turn to Nvidia for a quick GPU.
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Actually i remember watching something on G4TV that had Krazy Ken explain how he sat down with IBM and considered a CPU/GPU hybrid.
So while documents say your version, which was later changed to be an evolutionary chart into the CELL 2 presented at E3 05, there was some talk about what I said as well as the dual-CELL design.
Still the CELL can render and decode video insanely well making it so that it can act as a pre-decoder for the GPU or handle some base calculations for physics and other graphic related areas.
If someone could fine Killzone 2's SPE map I could have sworn it had a some of graphical processes pushed through them as well as AI and the rest of the code.
