Cell CPU as the next thing?

[commodorejohn]

I'm not an expert on the matter, but Cell strikes me as one of those things like Itanium where it's just too damn complicated to bother with. Software-directed caching sounds good in theory, and if you're willing to tweak it properly I'm sure it can run very well indeed, but for normal software development, you'd need a pretty freaking smart compiler to make the most of it.

Besides, FPU performance is only one small part of overall system performance.

[commodorejohn]

Saying something outperforms a Pentium IV is not saying much at all. Pentium IIIs outperform P4s, clock-for-clock. There's a reason Intel dropped Netburst completely and went back to the P3 as the basis for designing the Core architecture.