Suze'Rain
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Posted - 2005.09.23 19:56:00 -
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 Originally by: theRaptor
No the CELL has 8 processing units which run "programs" on there own, and one overseer processing unit. The big thing about CELL is each of the 8 can be configured to do a wide variety of tasks. Which is not the same as a CPU core (which probably have 6 different purpose processing units).
The CELL is in interesting architecture but stupidly difficult to program in, writing low level code for normal CPU's is pretty hard, but the CELL is a completely different type of processor. And can more work then the equivalent normal CPU.
However you will not even see the CELL taken to the limits for a good year and a half, but by then normally CPU's will simply be doing more with sheer power. The way the CELL works means you will need to hand tune the code as compilers haven't had the 15+ years to mature as traditional CPU compilers have. Sony did something similar to the CELL on the PS2 (the emotion engine), and it took a long time for programmers to get used to it. The CELL is a few orders of magnitude beyond that.
This is also similar to the debacle that was Geforce Fives, which where technically more powerful then ATI 9XXX GPU's, but needed hand tuned code to get that power.
The Xbox360 is going the easy route and just using three fairly traditional cores but PowerPC (what Macintosh use) instead of X86 (Intel).
7, not 8, I've been lead to beleive. there's one redundant cell in there due to production issues, and the industry reports I've been reading are indicating that only 7 will actually be run concurrently, and even if production quality increases later, they of course can't increase to all 8 in parralell, since some of the early consoles will only have 7 cells operational.
I suspect that in all likelihood, from what I've been hearing from a range of industry figureheads who've been using the SDKs of the next-gen consoles, nintendo might well manage throw up a lot of surprises through the fact it's architechture is much simpler. consoles have a history of proving that complex architecture results in unsuccessful products, unable to exploit the raw power behind them - The Jaguar, for instance. At the absolute minimum, the first generation of 360 and ps3 products are going to be well short of the technical limitations of the hardware.
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