I repeat, 1 Cell = 5 dual core Opterons. 4 Cells on a PS3 will walk all over X86-based CPUs, or anything this side of an IBM z-series
the thing about the cell, is that it will have something similar to a POWER5 as the general purpose CPU, but it will have 8 Attached Processor Units (APUs). The APU's are vector processors - like a cray. This doesn't mean they are automatically superfast. They are superfast for specific operations, and those operations must be designed to take advantage of the vector processor.
In a way, it's like designing an application for a multi-processor machine. If you didn't design it with multi-processors in mind, then simply adding more processors won't speed up the application.
A good intro to this would be here:
http://www.nus.edu.sg/Major/SVU/techinfo/vector_processing.html
Just because the author says 5 opterons = 1 cell, doesn't mean that you'll be able to load up Gentoo on your PS3, and install a stage1 in under an hour. It does mean that a "properly designed" SETI client would be able to chew through some data sets in the fraction of the time of the opterons.
However, look for some new advances in gcc because of this.
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