Cell processors and the potential use in now aday PC's

Wondering if anyone knows if there is any development on the Cell processor or even if IBM is going to make this available on PC or not... This is what has... I know that from the tests run that it is a superior processor architecture and am just wondering if we will see it in a PC anytime soon...

From all that I know, the "Cell Architecture" is nothing but a 64-Bit PowerPC CPU attached with eight Co-Processors. So it's quite different from the PC architecture. Since it's based on the PowerPC architecture, you can't run x86 code on it. First of all that means you can't run Windows on Cell. Maybe you can run Mac OS X or some Linux compiled for PowerPC. Second, existing applications would (maybe) run on Cell's PowerPC CPU, but they would not use the eight Co-Processors at all! So unless your application is specifically optimized for Cell and it's many Co-Processors, it won't benefit from Cell. Just throwing your application on Cell and hope for the magic speed-up due to it's "superior processor architecture" won't work. I assume that code, which wasn't developed and optimized specifically for Cell, would run pretty slow on Cell. Unless you explicitly utilize the Co-Processors, all that remains is a single-core PowerPC processor. Not that great! I think it's very similar to using the GPU as a Co-Processor: It has a lot of potential, but is very hard to actually make use of it...

Vista has an Itanium version, their file sizes are generally twice that for the IA64 version when compared to x86. x64 is in most cases slightly larger than x86. How come the file sizes are so much bigger, less efficient coding?

I'm not positive but I think it uses fixed size opcodes which are much larger than x86 but with each opcode containing 3 instructions. Possibly uses absolute addressing too whereas x64 can get away with 32-bit relative addressing 90% of the time.

Thanx for that incite to the Cell Processors Potential... I was Wondering about that for some time cause I figured that if PS3 System could handle it why not X.nix and Windows... I am wondering why the frequency of the processors has not gone past 3.8GH on the consumer level. I know that Duel and Quad and potentially Octo Processors are coming out that would Stomp a larger frequency, but do to the fact that we now have x64 bit OSes. Would it not make sense to speed up the current Binary Frequency for x64 bit CPU's??? What bars them from breaching the 4GH level???

True... We're now focusing on multi-core with each core a full-fledged CPU, since more MHz is clearly not going to cut it... but I think soon we're going to need some serious changes in the CPU industry. Current physics tells us conventional transistors can only get so small... It seems like there's an alternative proposed every day, but then they vanish, whether due to lack of funding or problems with the proposal, who knows... Hopefully, if we do hit a sort of barrier waiting for 'the next big thing', there'll be a re-focusing on more efficient software. It's inexcusable how bloated and inefficient software has become. Appalling to me that I can use Linux with Compiz Fusion (standalone), a complete custom-made desktop environment, and it idles using 1/4th the RAM Vista does idling. And I'm not just picking on MS, there's tons (though generally less, thanks to KISS and the Unix philosophy) of bloated programs for Linux as well. Programmers in general have gotten too reliant on the fact that most people have high-powered machines, and can take the load. Firefox, Azureus/Vuze, and OpenOffice are all great apps, but are either bloated or suffering from memory leaks. x264 is a golden, shining example of what an app can be... VERY lean, and VERY mean. Plus, fantastic multi-threading. I understand very well that it's hard to make a lean app, but it's got to be a higher priority IMO, even at the cost of slower development. We've seen it can be done (uTorrent, Openbox/PekWM, x264, Media Player Classic HC, XMMS). Let's do it more often :D KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid Some Unix software philosophy: Small is beautiful, Make each program do one thing well, etc.

/r/ for 8x8x8 3D photonic processor :devil: