Intel vs. Cell technology (was RE: Hell has frozen over)

[JStay at mediageneral.com]

> The cell is not 'relatively weak' in that department.  That 
> is the exact department in which the cell is extraordinarily 
> powerful.  Each cell contains
> 8 APUs.  Each APU is itself an independent 128bit vector 
> processor (and each has a whopping 128 registers--compare 
> that to the resources available in cpus with AltiVec (32) or 
> MMX/SSE (far fewer even)).  And they run at 4.6GHz.
> 
> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html
> 
> A dual cpu system with quad cores would be required to even 
> come close to the performance of a _single_ cell cpu.  Worse, 
> the 8 cores are sharing synchronous memory w/memory 
> protection whereas the 8 APUs have no memory protections to 
> slow them down and can run completely asynchronously w/o 
> bumping into each other on the bus.
> 

My prediction is competition will eventuall force Intel to develop
technology that is similar or surpasses the cell as their core processor
technology.  I wouldn't worry too much about the cell outperforming
Intel at the moment.  Just my opinion...

Jesse