IBM's Radical Cell Processor

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 13, 2006 @11:27PM from the those-wacky-chips dept.

Rouslan Solomakhin writes "Forbes has recently posted an article on IBM's new revolutionary Cell processor. Cell is going to enable PS3 developers to create movie-quality games with blazing-speed graphics. Applications in other areas are also considered." From the article: "Some techies say PlayStation 3, which may debut by midyear and could end up in 100 million homes in five years, will usher in the next microchip revolution. The Sony system owes its prowess to a microprocessor called Cell, which was cooked up by chip wizards at IBM (with help from Sony and Toshiba) at a cost of $400 million over five years."

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The truth is simpler by Stan+Vassilev · 2006-01-13 23:47 · Score: -1, Troll

Preliminary specs of PS3 proved that XBOX 360 is rather close to this.

Also "movie-quality games" depend mostly on the GPU, not CPU. Cell is the CPU, so maybe movie-quality hair phisics and accurate collision detection but graphics ain't really a part of this.

Cell sounded revolutionary few years ago, but with Intel prepping to offer 32-core (yep, 32 core..) processor in less than 2 years, which also means compatible with the tons of 86 apps out there, it just lost its magic.