Friday, March 03, 2006

The 9-in-1 Wonder Chip

I don't get all the hype about the IBM/Sony/Toshiba "Cell" chip: The 9-in-1 Wonder Chip - September 5, 2005

Sure, I can believe it's a very fast, efficient CPU, with provisions for multi-processing. But IBM is betting its whole computing future on it? And how could this be so revolutionarily different from anything that all the other genius CPU designers have come up with, including AMD and deep-pocketed Intel?

I don't get it, but I'd like to. What's so different?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Take a look:
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/cell_chip.html

http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/

George Harper said...

I have to confess being equally skeptical. While I think okay for a very targeted application, where the architecture has been well thought out to be matched with that specific application. As a general purpose platform though? Even then, I'm pretty skeptical about using a bunch of processors for applications like graphics, where a customized accelerator tends to be a better optimization for performance, speed and area. Processors aren't yet free -- and, memory bandwidth definitely isn't yet.