Death to Intel... and AMD?

[PotatoMAN]

... but I am just wondering what you guys think =P

 

[clarkey01]

I would hope that in that wishful thinking scenario that IBM would buy AMD and implement cell into thier designs, which wouldnt be x86, which, er makes no point anyway, erm. Nevermind

 

[bookman]

We shall see. Personally, I think it sounds too much like marketing hype. Also, it looks like its not compatible with anything, so all the programs written for the X86 architecture wont work, and this poses a HUGE problem that may keep it from being widely accepted. But this is all speculation - we wont know until samples get evaluated and critiqued by independent reviewers like Anand.

 

[Zebo]

Don't believe the hype is a sequel. -Public Enemy

 

[shira]

This issue has been posted before. The following article provides a detailed anaysis of the Cell chip, and its likely affect on PCs:

Cell document

 

[91TTZ]

That article is utter trash.

 

[bobsmith1492]

That looks more like a video processor than a CPU. If you look at the stats on a modern video processor, I bet they blow away the cell.....

 

[NightCrawler]

Until it can bought for $150 at newegg I don't think it matters.

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: NightCrawler
Until it can bought for $150 at newegg I don't think it matters.

LOL and run windows/linux etc and other i86 stuff.

 

[Jeff7]

Heard about The Cell - it sounded like a Bitboys press release. It should be interesting to see what it actually turns out to be.

But hey, if it really does deliver incredible speeds, maybe we can finally start looking at things like realtime voice recognition that's smart enough to understand normal speech. Maybe.

 

[phr0m]

yeah i think sony is trying to overplay this a little to much, but it could be a some what decent chip, but there is no way it could take down AMD or intel

 

[PotatoMAN]

I do admit that this is probably marketing hype, but it is nice to know that there are other chip manufacturers willing to kick the mainstream CPU and GPU manufacturers into gear and get something out there better, faster, and cheaper for us.

 

[Mucker]

PowerPC deja Vu........could it be another so called Intel killer........

m

 

[thegimp03]

It won't ever happen. At this point both AMD, and, to a lesser degree, Intel, have a competitive advantage with their pricing. I'm sure they could easily keep "the cell's" market share low just by charging much lower prices. Anyways, "the cell" is meant for high-end pcs/servers/etc. The vast majority of people buy HP off the shelf or order a Dell because they're lower-priced and more mainstream.

 

[BitByBit]

I think we'll finally get to see just how the Cell compares to mainstream CPUs when Microsoft releases XBox 2.
MS wouldn't release a technologically inferior competitor to PS3.

 

[smartsam]

I read through the whole Blachford article the other night. I don't pretend to understand a whole lot of it, but his basic reasoning behind his hypothesis that Cell could blow everything out of the water seemed to be this: "Cell is so fast that compatibility doesn't matter because it can emulate anything current without a performance hit noticeable to the end user." The problem with this seems to be to me that SOMEBODY is going to have to write these emulators, compilers, etc. for this all to work. PS3 is one thing, working with the incredible diversity of hardware in the PC market (and Mac, and cellphones, and PDAs, etc. as he hypothesizes) is another. One of the reasons Wintel/x86 is so widespread is that Microsoft is big enough that they can either set standards/models for hardware builders, or they have the software engineers to make the drivers for those hardware devices to work. If Cell will be able to replace all kinds of specialized DSPs like Blachford states, where will the software/algorithms come from? Won't it take a lot of work to write compilers for Cell?

I may have totally missed the point, but these seem like really big problems to me.

 

[RussianSensation]

Originally posted by: BitByBit
I think we'll finally get to see just how the Cell compares to mainstream CPUs when Microsoft releases XBox 2.
MS wouldn't release a technologically inferior competitor to PS3.

Yeah but last time i heard XB2 is going to have a PowerPC derivative (IBM developed) cpu or something along those lines and not an Intel cpu.

Either way, Rambus was reaching 1066 mhz speeds when it was not longer "liked" by the PC community. DDR2 is still unable to reach those speeds. And yet DDR-400 spec PC is still just as fast as DDR2-733PC. Specs arent' everything. Last time I checked Dreamcast was way more powerful than PS1 and A64 and look how that turned out.

 

[imported_IKnowNothing]

Well guys, I'm not sure how the Cell processor will pan out but I hope it is as good as stated.

From all that I've read it looks like there are some huge players involved with this processor, and these players have been around for a long time. I see no reason why they can't pull it off. Sony has some major bucks and has the backing from some serious know how dudes. They have all the connections they could possibly want so I really think this is going to happen.

I like change and I like what this processor brings to the plate. The desktop world will be juggled a bit but the options will be amazing if this flies.

thegimp03 said:
"It won't ever happen. At this point both AMD, and, to a lesser degree, Intel, have a competitive advantage with their pricing. I'm sure they could easily keep "the cell's" market share low just by charging much lower prices. Anyways, "the cell" is meant for high-end pcs/servers/etc. The vast majority of people buy HP off the shelf or order a Dell because they're lower-priced and more mainstream. "

The cell is supposed to be a wickedly fast/cheap/army swiss knife processor. How can Intel or AMD price things cheaper than IBM or SONY? Sony and IBM have as many or more connections and I'm sure they can beat on Intel and AMD if they need to.

The Cell is meant for high-end pcs/servers? No it is meant for any kind of application IBM and SONY can think of, and at an affordable price. They have the resources to be very competitive against the wintel and AMD competition. Is the PS3 expensive? I think you can get a foreshadow by its price...which is cheap compared to PC's.

The GPU (nvidia/ATI) boys have been working on something like this for awhile now but they still don't compare to the CELL. The CELL is developed to process information from the ground up in a way current GPU/CPU's can't.

I will bet that the CELL...IS the future PC if SONY and IBM and Linux and APPLE combine to form a new empire

The big boys at the top like AMD, Intel and Microsoft were once the little boys at the bottom. Life is a circle and they are on the way down again. I'm sorry if you don't like this comment but that is the way life works.

 

[AnandThenMan]

It is very VERY important to grasp that the Cell arcitecture is a totally new (well in some ways old) way of doing things. The concept is brilliant, but very very difficult to pull off. IF Sony/IBM/Toshiba can bring this thing to market in the next 8-12 months, look out. There is no denying the Cell technology being put forward here is far and away ahead of a convential CPU we all use. It has a major advantage (and disadvantage) because it does away will all the abstraction layers. I honestly believe that the Cell concept is the way of the future. It is taking the dual core idea and innovating on it 1000 times over. The only question for me is if the big 3 will actually be able to pull this off. If they can, you can honestly say goodbye to your convential CPU because it won't have a chance.