The Cell Processor by IBM and....

[wetcat007]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
i forget how much a p4 3ghz puts out, but it can't be more then a 100watt lightbulb you live in hell or somethign?

well the prescott will put out more heat than a 100 watt lightbulb... sadly..

 

[d0wnthe11235813]

the way i understood the cell would work was that it has 16? cores and they all connect up to a distribution circuit. if they did it in a certian way and assigned certian tasks to each core, say a gravity engine to one core and a friction one to another or an enviroment one and a physical objects one, they would have a core that was highly optimized and be able to run at a low clock with low power but still have an encredible performance output if software programming was done right.
in the case of the PS2, developers had a lot of trouble with programming at first because their code needed to be highly optimized to get good performance. Sony took the gamble and won, and id be more than will to bet that they would do it agian if they trained programmers to code for Cell.
there is my two cents, but dont spend it all at once

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: TerryMathews

Originally posted by: pm
You wouldn't need luck. An Itanium boots to MSDOS fine. I don't know why you would want to, but you could easily. Without Windows or emulation. There is an internal hardware translation engine on the core of the Itanium and the Itanium 2 that translates IA32 instructions on the fly into IA64. The system will boot MSDOS, or Windows 3.11 if you want.

This is interesting. I'm going to have to bitch-slap my sources. I guess they got confused by Intel's emulation layer for Windows and assumed that the chip couldn't natively do it. Evidently, the Windows emulation layer is just better than the hardware support?

a company called exponential held patents for an extremely similar method for implementing dual instruction sets on a processor (bascially running x86 on an IBM 604 PPC, iirc). when apple didn't pick up any of their tech they went belly up and sold their patents to pay off creditors. at auction were quite a few of the semiconductor heavyweights including intel. S3 eventually won the patent, which prompted intel to sign a broad cross-licensing agreement with them. when S3 left the graphics industry they sold their gfx biz to Via. Via claims that the patent was transfered as well, which gives them use of the P4's AGTL bus, and why they wouldn't pay intel a royalty for it.