When can we see Cell processor powered PC?

I just read an article done by realtech news on Cell processor. If Cell processor is about 10 times more powerful then any of ours computer, than how come there is no plan of moving Cell into the market?

I know that for one Cell processors are very very difficult to yield. Sony has to turn off 1 of the 8 cores to get an acceptable yield.

Any contribution by anyone is gratefully accepted

It seems from that description that they could possibly be used as a coprocessor for specialized type workstations or media systems. Anything to speed up HD encoding would be welcome.

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-The String

This is probably as close as your going to get to a cell based computer. Besides a cell based server or PS3 running linux.

Well i think it's a comparison of apples and oranges. It may be 10x more powerful at some things but it was designed with those things in mind.

If you are building a cpu for a games console you are going to make sure it has good floating point abilities.

There was a big rave about the ps3 folding client. Check the stats, the GPU's crunch a lot more out per client and by large margin.
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bi [...] pe=osstats

That said, I won't take anything away from the cell, i expect it's a very good processor. It would nice to see some benchmarks of it doing normal stuff?

In my opinion it might be possable in a year or so. I just installed YDL 5.0 and the PS3 functions just like a computer. It even recognizes the PS3 controller as an input device. I am just starting to work on porting over a Windows homebrew game from anouther community. the hyperadvsor does not allow any acceleration yet but I can see that changing. The most recent firmware update 1.6 from sony had the bootloader added which was great since you did not require it to be downloaded from a memory stick. I see a few firmwares down the line them adding the hyperadvisor to allow acceleration access in YDL.

To make it like a desktop or laptop you would a motherboard designed from scratch with enough memory and catch. I don't know but it might be possable to code an SPE to act like additional catch for a specfic application.

My 4000 san diego, 2 gigs and a en7800gtx is faster currently on loading and stuff. But it is still early on. Folding would take allot longer on my Sandy then on my PS3 so they did a good coding job on that.

Cell has about as much chance of succeeding in the PC space as the intel Itanium.

It seems from that description that they could possibly be used as a coprocessor for specialized type workstations or media systems. Anything to speed up HD encoding would be welcome.


I guess we weren't the only people thinking about the possibilities:


http://www.tgdaily.com/index.php?o [...] Itemid=118

Looks like this will happen soon.

dung

That would be a *great* usage for the Cell as a matter of fact. It's a pretty strict in-order, inhomogeneous chip. It's a heck of a number cruncher but would make a pretty poor general-purpose CPU by itself. But use it as a math coprocessor or a similar use and it would fly.