Not only can you not access the GPU, but Sony has implemented a hypervisor running between the hardware and the OS. So any I/O calls are extremely slow. I played with the Cell processor in a PS3 for a few months and found that the hard disk and NIC I/O were unacceptably slow due to the hypervisor. I was able to get better performance from a quad-core Opteron based server.
I don't want to bash the Cell processor though. One other thing to point out is that if one utilizes the SIMD instruction set, you can perform 4 operations simultaneously on one of the SPE's. So one could essentially run 4*6=24 instructions at the same time with these chips. I was successful in doing this but the slow I/O speeds pretty much killed the project.
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Not only can you not access the GPU, but Sony has implemented a hypervisor running between the hardware and the OS. So any I/O calls are extremely slow. I played with the Cell processor in a PS3 for a few months and found that the hard disk and NIC I/O were unacceptably slow due to the hypervisor. I was able to get better performance from a quad-core Opteron based server. I don't want to bash the Cell processor though. One other thing to point out is that if one utilizes the SIMD instruction set, you can perform 4 operations simultaneously on one of the SPE's. So one could essentially run 4*6=24 instructions at the same time with these chips. I was successful in doing this but the slow I/O speeds pretty much killed the project.