Kynes said:
You should make several modifications to the PPU and the number of them to make a variant of cell suitable to PCs. Several out of order PPUs (branching, integer work) paired with SPUs (number crunching) could be an acceptable processor for an end user computer. The problem is that you have to migrate to a new architecture, and you don't have the critical mass of users to impose that change.
DX10/GPGPU isn't that important yet, and has millions of potential users, why a computer with a Cell's architecture processor should triumph?
I think the problem here is that Cell (and PS3's architecture in general) has an halo of mysticism. A lot of people believe it's the second coming, the same way emotion engine and graphics synthesizer were underpowered related to the hype created around them.
Sony PR guys must be very proud of their work reading threads like this one.
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Actually, what you just described is an 8 core Power processor. The Cell processor was developed at a time when it simply wasn't very cost effective to have an 8/9 core processor due to technological limitations (which we have now overcome). The Cell is basically a Power core with 7/8 gimped cores. The SPEs are not anything amazing, there are just a lot of them, which give the Cell its speed. If you add the functionality to the SPEs that you suggested, the end result would be a simple 8 core processor. It would no longer be a Cell processor. Btw, I would like to add that IBM has 8 core Power7 processors with 4 threads per core that outperform the Cell processor.
The Cell processor has no mysticism at all and it certainly isn't a second coming of anything. Throughout the years there have been many processors with unique architectures that have come out and claimed the performance crown for a short while but were quickly surpassed by traditional processors with more support. It will have a nice spot in the history books but it has no future at all. The concept behind the cell (many fast and simple cores) will live on, but the Cell processor certainly wasn't the first chip to have that.