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A Glimpse Inside the Cell Processor
XenoPhage writes "Gamasutra has up an article by Jim Turley about the design of the Cell processor, the main processor of the upcoming Playstation 3. It gives a decent overview of the structure of the cell processor itself, including the CBE, PPE, and SPE units." From the article: "Remember your first time? Programming a processor, that is. It must have seemed both exciting and challenging. You ain't seen nothing yet. Even garden-variety microprocessors present plenty of challenges to an experienced programmer or development team. Now imagine programming nine different processors all at once, from a single source-code stream, and making them all cooperate. When it works, it works amazingly well. But making it work is the trick."
"Console gamers get consoles because they can't deal with installing video card drivers."
Nope, console gamers buy consoles because they offer games that dont appear on the PC and/or dont have the money to buy a pc gaming rig. $1200+ (im talking building from the ground up with reliable and decent parts) to just start getting a decent computer together usualy isnt as justifiable as spending ($100:GC, $130:DS, $150:PS2/Xbox, $200:PSP, $400:360) for a console of some sort.
I love to slaughter the english language.
I think the article's point was that once you get more and more transistors on there it becomes very difficult to design things to not end up overheating all the time and not use up insane amounts of power, not to mention just becoming extremely complex like x86 cores today.
I wasn't talking so much about the article as a whole, but the insane levels of hyperbole in the particular paragraph I quoted. "We're capable of putting more transistors on a chip than we can think of things to do with". That's not even vaguely true.
More transistors == more power, all else being equal, because it's all those junctions flipping state so quickly that uses the power.
As for the insanity if Intel's processors... that seems to be a perversion particular to Intel. In the past three decades that I've been following the industry, Intel has only managed to produce *one* sane CPU design, the i960, and they promptly caponised it by removing the MMU and relegating it to embedded controls lest it outcompete their cash cow.
The rest... from the 4004 through the 8080, the 8086 and its many descendants, iApx432, i860, and Itanium... have been consistently outperformed by chips with smaller transistor budgets built by companies with far fewer resources. They only occasionally broke past the midrange of the RISC chips, and were usually trailing back with the anemic Sparc. Where they have excelled has been marketing and in the breadth of their support... both hardware and business. IBM went with the 8088 because they could get them in quantity and they could get good cheap support chips for them: if you went with Motorola or Zilog or Western Digital or National Semiconductor you pretty much had to go back to Intel to build the rest of your computer anyway.