Sony's Cell chip for a New Amiga

[Iggy]

I actually contacted IBM to inquire about the Cell BE.
In the end, I was exchanging messages with some of the engineers and the head of the department that developed the processor.
IBM position is that the processor has not been documented for general uase, but that they are willing to work with qualified customers on projects that they see potential in.

That said, the Cell's in order instruction execution lowers its performance per cycle when compared to out of order processors and with its accessory processors (the SPEs) the Cell can be difficult program for.

Other PPCs from Freescale and Applied Micro make more sense.

[Iggy]

Off topic alert -
 
Sin after sin, I have endured. Yet the wounds I bear, are the wounds of love.

God bless K.K. Downing!
 
Whey hey - Judas Priest fan eh?
 
One of the most underrated Brit metal bands ever!

Absolutely one of my favorites!

Just saw them in Reading PA.

I was worried that K.K. Downing's departure would really messy up things, but Ritchie Faulkner pretty good (he's not Kenny, but he's really enjoying himself).

[Iggy]

The actual CPU is quite slow per clock, only made up in part by it's high clocks. It might run at 3.2GHz but it performs like a contemporary 1.6GHz CPU. It does have the ability to run two threads at the same time however, but that's not much use for AmigaOS currently.

Bingo, the Cell is significantly less powerful then most out of order PPCs on a per clock cycle basis.

I'm no expert on the subject, but the Cell  architecture just looks unnecessarily complicated. Software-directed  caching means you really need to know what you're doing and have a good  compiler - and while that more or less works for a system that's  fundamentally only going to be running one program at a time, trying to  coordinate that extra complexity across a whole desktop OS's worth of  different programs and threads sounds like a nightmare if I ever heard  of it.

I've made that argument before. Standard PPC architecture is basically  RISC. Adding SPEs and coordinating the PPE with all those coprocessors  makes things way too complicated.

Personally, I want to see Freescale's T5040 (@2.5 GHz or above).