Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 8th Feb 2006 18:24 UTC
Big Blue announced it would use the Cell processor designed by it, Sony and Toshiba in a range of high end servers. Applications that need good processing power and can render graphics are the target of Big Blue's desire. The first systems will become available in the third quarter of this year.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Absolutely. Cell is very interesting for certain applications, but not general applications. For example, in the communications field, there are software-defined radios that have a board with 2-4 G4 (MPC74xx) processors and maybe a couple of Virtex FPGAs. All that hardware is used to do signal processing on the data coming in from the receiver. Needless to say, the things are neither cheap nor very energy efficient. All that hardware could probably be replaced by a single Cell chip running at 2-3GHz. The software developers wouldn't really care, since the code has to be specially written for the hardware anyway, and the hardware could be substantially smaller and cheaper. Ultimately, I think these places are where you're going to see Cell take off, not in the general purpose computing sector.