Ed Clarke wrote:
The ppc64 arch is likely to become much more important once the Sony-Toshiba-IBM processor gets into consumer hands.
Understand that "Cell" is not a "generic" CPU. It is a configuration-fixed "Power-based core" with vector units attached. In a nutshell, it's like having a "moderate performing" single CPU platform with specialized SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) units. You have to write software to take advantage of those units, and compiler-based optimizations are _un_likely to give you much without such coding.
The new Sony playstation is supposed to use it
Yes, because a console platform will have libraries written specifically for the vector units, and titles written to take advantage of those libraries.
Whether or not those libraries -- in part or in full -- are released by Sony to the community is anyone's guess at this point. If Sony follows its history, it will release a $20,000+ developer system with those libraries (no, the $200 Linux kit for the PS/2 was not the full development kit ;-).
and I have seen Linux running on at least the simulator.
The PS/3 is supposed to run a release of Linux. The PS/2 development kit was Linux-based, but the PS/3 is the first that is a Linux target. I'm sure GNU/Linux was chosen because it allows them to build a quick target for the new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), while leveraging much of the existing Power/PowerPC GCC target and OS.
There were rumors that the PS/3 might run MacOS X as a set-top unit. I could be to to leverage the existing "desktop" MacOS X apps, using largely just the core (no vector processing) as a "moderately performing" Mac system. But I don't know if the Cell's Power core is PowerPC (Power is _not_ fully ISA compatible with PowerPC), no one has given me a straight answer on that. So I seriously doubt it.
Unless there is some "virtualization" mode to their Linux codebase that lets them run a MacOS X instance to them run those apps. That might be more feasible.
This is an extremely powerful chip - similar to an eight way SMP ppc.
Sorry, don't mean to cross you, but that's an oversimplification that simply isn't remotely true. It is a single Power core with vector units -- nothing like a multi-core solution.
Only Microsoft's XBox 360 is a 3-way multi-core Power CPU.
The PS/3 is a Power core with vector units attached, radically different.
That's a good link, but even he doesn't know what the final ISA will look like.
I also don't think he realizes that the inprecise nature of the vector units will limit the potential of the Cell for many scientific/engineering applications. 19GFLOPS is great, unless you actually need precision.
E.g., you could _never_ use the Cell for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), which was one of the first and most linearly scaling applications for Linux clusters.