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IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor
angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."
If IBM is looking to leverage their regular POWER chipset for the console market, they will probably build some screamers with them
All of the current generation consoles use IBM chips. The GameCube and Wii both used PowerPC 4xx series chips - IBM's low-end 32-bit PowerPC line. The XBox 360 uses a custom 3-core in-order PowerPC chip. The PS3 uses Cell (PowerPC core + 7 SPUs - the PS3 gets the ones where one of the SPUs failed the tests, the ones where all 8 work go into blades and supercomputers).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's more of a triangle. In one corner, you have general-purpose CPUs, optimised for branch-heavy code with lots of locality of reference. In another, you have streaming, often SIMD, processors optimised for non-branching code, with high throughput, such as GPUs and DSPs. In the third corner, you have specialised silicon dedicated to specific algorithms (e.g. building blocks for encryption algorithms or video CODECs).
Cell is along one side of this. It isn't particularly throughput-focussed, and it is optimised for locality of reference. You have to DMA in a block of memory (under 256KB), process it, and then store it. It is not optimised for branching. It is heavily SIMD. The real problem with it is that there aren't that many algorithms that benefit from this combination of CPU features.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And nothing of value was lost to them. The only thing related to the PS3 that interests Sony is the selling of games, Blu-Rays and stuff from PSN. A bunch of basement dwellers installing Linux on their PS3 was an afterthought at best.