Amiga and CELL - What you think about

[coldfish]

Oh great another "cell" thread!

+1 to everything that Piru said.

Cell is an architecture not a specific chip, so yes IBM or one of the other partners could add a fully functional PPE instead of the hobbled form that will be at the helm of the PS3's cell chip.  But you can bet such a CPU would be utilised in massively parallell configurations instead of single unit desktop machines.

So, no.  Not only do I not see cell being used with an Amiga OS (unless someone hacks a PS3 to run it as a proof of concept rather than a useable platform).  I doubt we'll ever see cell in any desktop platform.  Sony will use cell in their PS3 and maybe in some other form in general consumer electronics, acting as a high speed DSP.  IBM and Toshiba (maybe) will use it in mainframes.

@boing; actually, if you read a little about development of the cell concept and architecture you'd find that Sony, Toshiba and IBM have been having real trouble getting the thing to work.  Its no coincidence that each PS3-cell chip has 8 physical SPE's but only 7 working, one being sacrificed to increase yeild.

Cell in the PS3 will also run HOT!  And its a sure bet that Sony cant wait to shift it down to the next process to reduce power consumption/heat output and silicon.  I cant wait to see what the cooling inside PS3 looks and sounds like...

[coldfish]

Anyway a single Cell board has show up to 250 Gflops of computing power.

Someone been reading Sony Marketing BS?

Using a console as a desktop is like towing a trailer using a Formula-One.

I'm guessing we'll be having this same conversation in 5 years when PS4 comes out, boasting magic-super-wonder-chip.  The implications for the Amiga will be just the same.

[coldfish]

This is far from correct. In fact we are going through the process of assessing the PS3 for various 'non-gaming' applications...

Yeah, just as some people used PS2 clusters to do cheap vector processing.  Still, I dont see any PS2-cluster based supercomputers on the top 500.

PS3 may contain a complete version of (Sony's) cell processor, but read more about the PPU and you'll quickly find it's a hobbled (reduced-transistor-count), G4-class design, hardly current desktop smashing material taken on its own.  It remains to be seen how useful those 7 SPE's will be...
 
In any case, "Cell" is just an umbrella term used to cover an architecture not a single specific chip, so making statements about cell's physical attributes are a waste of time as Toshiba's and IBM's devices could be significantly different to anything Sony produces.

Anyone that thinks a PS3 is going to replace a desktop computer for doing desktop/workstation activities is just as crazy as Ken Kuturagi.  Wasnt he the guy that said PS2 would render Toy Story gfx in realtime?