On Sun, Nov 27, 2005 at 04:43:20AM -0700, William Kucharski wrote: > > On Nov 27, 2005, at 2:57 AM, Gabriele Bulfon wrote: > > >There's a lot of rumor about the Cell Processor being researched by > >IBM/Toshiba/Sony for their next PS3 platform: > >http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars > >http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html > > > >What about Solaris 10 on such a platform? > >What the goods and bads? > > The biggest drawback is that Cell is NOT designed as a general purpose > computing processor, but as a very specialized processor for video > game usage.
Notice that : 1) the Cell processor has 8 (or 16, not sure i remember well) Cell units, which are capable of handling their own (DSP or SIMD like) instruction set, which is totally unrelated to powerpc. 2) In addition of the Cell units, it also has a reduced PPC970 core to act as control processor, and for handling non-purely-graphic stuff, like game AI or other such. This is also the one booting the initial system. 3) The PS3 is interesting, but more interesting will be future IBM based Cell blades, using the Cell units in scientific processing and such. As such, it should be relatively easy to run Polaris on the Cell, but taking advantage of the actual Cell units would maybe not be that evident, and it should be slower than an equivalent PPC970. Friendly, Sven Luther
