IBM to use Cell in Blade Servers

taskforce writes "IBM announced on Wednesday that it would be putting versions of its Cell processor inside its increasingly popular low-power blade servers by this summer. From the article: 'For Cell to gain wide acceptance, IBM needs to spur outside programmers to write software that takes advantage of Cell's prowess. That could prove more challenging than usual because Cell's architecture is so different. IBM hopes this summer's release of the Cell-based servers kick-starts work by third-party programmers.'" Also covered in a PCPro article.

Comments

Your organs are specialized, too.

[Orrin Bloquy]

It's a hell of a paradigm shift for programmers to go from writing code that targets one CPU to code that deliberately splinters tasks across a bank of specialized processors.

It's fun to bash the Cell as a general purpose CPU when no one has actually suggested it's designed for that.

All of the above being true, it remains to be seen what gains IBM's POWER/Cell system actually offers above present architectures -- RISC was the next big thing, too, until Intel internalized part of it into the x86 architecture.

Flyover landscape graphics demos are a shopworn rabbit pulled out of a threadbare hat: convert fractals into craggy vertical displacements with extremely primitive lighting/mapping. Show me an architecture that can *realtime* render Incredibles-caliber cloth/hair simulations and I'll get a hard-on while ATI and nVidia executives slit their wrists.