On Monday 06 June 2005 01:55 pm, Mitch Anderson wrote: > from my reading, its doubtful they would have used the cell anyway. > (atleast not as the main processor in a future powerpc) altho it is > possible to still use it as a graphics render/coprocessor as Jobs had in > his NeXT days. My understanding of the Cell, while based on PPC, is > still different enough that its not just a simple recompile. Apple's to > dependant on the AltiVec[1] and the Cell's relatively weak in that > deparment.
The cell is not 'relatively weak' in that department. That is the exact department in which the cell is extraordinarily powerful. Each cell contains 8 APUs. Each APU is itself an independent 128bit vector processor (and each has a whopping 128 registers--compare that to the resources available in cpus with AltiVec (32) or MMX/SSE (far fewer even)). And they run at 4.6GHz. http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html A dual cpu system with quad cores would be required to even come close to the performance of a _single_ cell cpu. Worse, the 8 cores are sharing synchronous memory w/memory protection whereas the 8 APUs have no memory protections to slow them down and can run completely asynchronously w/o bumping into each other on the bus. -- Respectfully, Nicholas Leippe Sales Team Automation, LLC 1335 West 1650 North, Suite C Springville, UT 84663 +1 801.853.4090 http://www.salesteamautomation.com .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
