David Wood wrote:
Please correct me if I have this wrong: the changes in cell are more than just skin deep - more, even, than just adding multiple functional units and interconnects. I think it's appropriate to say that cell represents a kind of philosophical shift.
Exactly!
There are some readable background papers out now, for instance:
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2379
and
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2.ars
As an example, the cell approach to caching is radically different.
And so much more. They basically threw out all of the conventional wisdom about creating processors and started from a clean slate. When confronted with dogma (i.e. all modern CPU's must support "out-of-order" instruction processing), they asked why--and in many cases did the exact opposite (all 9 cores support only in-order execution). Their sole purpose was to create a processor that is ideally suited to highly parallel computing tasks (i.e. graphics processing, physics processing--the two key components of gaming--etc.) and cheap to produce.
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