IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor 124
angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."
We like money! (Score:4, Insightful)
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What?
There are going to be some 120-140 million or so PS3 sold over its 10-11 year lifetime. Yeah, IBM is making 'next to nothing with Cell'.
IBM was so happy with landing PPC/Cell contracts for all three consoles that they immediately dumped Apple as a customer upon doing so after being fed up with the nightmare of dealing with Apple and Jobs over the years.
Multicore for raytracing? (Score:3, Insightful)
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The Atari Transputer Workstation [wikipedia.org] already did that in the 80s. Coolest real-time raytracing ever!
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Hmm. I'd never looked into the Atari Transputer much. I figured it was a lot like an Amiga 2000/3000, but overhyped, and with GEM :) Turns out it was quite a machine, with a lot of innovation that's only catching on in PCs now. If it wasn't for the lack of an MMU, I might have liked to see it replace both Amigas and PCs :) Also, a lot of the stuff here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer [wikipedia.org]
Sounds like a summary of the Cell's raison d'etre.
Couple of questions:
* Is there an emulator of this, so I can ch
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They originated it, not copied it.
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There is an emulator, under active development, See posts on newsgroup com.sys.transputer.
The 260 megaflops must be for some kind of an array - they were designed to be used in arrays. The individual transputers never clocked faster than 25 MHz, though the FPU on the T800 was relatively fast for the time. Each transputer had four bidirectional links connected to DMA engines wired directly into the hardware scheduler, so that inter-processor communications were very low cost.
I can't see why the architecture
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These days you fire off renders by invoking the prman executable.... 'p' being short for 'prototype' (it became quickly apparent to Pixar that Sgi's development and performance curve was outpacing their own hardware division. Rather than try to compete, they simply shut down the hardware division,
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If they return to ROM cartridges, RAM is only needed for working memory. Anything that doesn't change can be stored directly in the memory-mapped ROM, and accessed as quickly as RAM is.
Re:So where's the story here? (Score:4, Informative)
The story is not that IBM continues to manufacture chips but that the Cell design is not dead. This contradicts earlier stories to some degree.
In all fairness, it contradicts only on the surface as IBM only stated in the older story that Cell as separate design will end and its co-processor-heavy design will merge with future POWER iterations.
There were also rumors that IBM won't manufacture PS3 Cell CPUs any longer, leaving it to contractors.
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The story is not that IBM continues to manufacture chips but that the Cell design is not dead.
To be frank, while playing games, I still preffer Pringles [wikipedia.org] to any other chips!
(in other words: WTF should I care what chips is my gaming machine using??)
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At the very least, you should acknowledge that the continued development of gaming devices (and associated technology) is spreading out into improvements in many other fields of technology, some of which you may find more interesting/relevant to your everyday life.
I acknowledge it if you like. But I fail to see how the Cell chip, in particular, has achived this: all the improvements in the technology, only Mercury computers [wikipedia.org] are not related to gaming.
Yes, until some time ago,one could run Linux on PS3 (thus making use of the Cell chip outside the entertainment area)... but the rumors have it as no longer possible.
Do you know otherwise?
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It is actually one branch of what is appearing to be a fork in gaming machines: ultra-high-performance renderers like the PS3, and peripheral driven lower performance systems like the Wii, Some people have sid that the Wii is the way of the future, current generation renderers do all the graphics you need, gaming developments will be in the UI not in graphics. This is a step down the opposite path: we can ans should g3t better graphics.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The reason your HD4650 is sufficient is because you're playing essentially console games on a graphics card thats slightly more powerful than the consoles themselves. Also you're only running at a low resolution, try gaming at 1920x1080 on your 4650, it won't get you too far.
There is a reason they didn't do that again, it's because it's more expensive than a dedicated console...
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Yeah until you see Modern Warfare 2 at 1920x1200, highest setting on an LCD monitor. It looks so sharp and the spectral and bump mapping and huge texture resolution really blew me a way. The hundreds of particles from various fires in the game, for instance the tree on fire in the sub urb map is an amazing sight I've never seen before. At 120hz for a more solid experience when you look around.
But yes gameplay is just as important. Monsters in Doom 1 and 2 that had pixelated blood splatters around the walls,
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Why not tell us that Intel is going to continue to make chips too?
Wait! What?
Have you heard something?
Posted anon - are you an Intel insider?
affordable (Score:1)
I hope that PS4 (or other console using it) will be linux-friendly as PS3 was until Sony blew it. Alas, however slim this chance is, there seem to be no better chance.
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Get PS3 with 3.41 or earlier firmware -> Jailbreak -> install linux.
Profit?
(actually linux for jailbroken ps3s is in the very early stages, but I'm sure it'll get there.
Makes more sense to buy into a... (Score:2)
...platform where you don't have to worry about some idiot company dictating what software you run on the hardware you purchased, don't you think?
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Oh sure, but if your aim is to try out cell programming, then that's pretty much your only option at present!
It would probably be better to try using CUDA and your graphics card...
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What?
Why the insults? I'm perfectly aware that circumvention is only necessary because of Sony asshattery, but as of *now* you can get a machine with firmware up to 3.41 and jailbreak it. Initial booting of linux has happened and I would expect in a few weeks or a couple of months to see it made relatively simple.
To spread more (Score:2)
Great, but where is the software expert side going to come from?
It seems to take years for any 3rd party to work out how to optimise "anything" HD for the systems.
With a push for more cores how about a push for more developer support vs "cloud-based" and p2p servers.
With more memory per CPU, it might not suck (Score:5, Interesting)
The basic problem with the Cell processor is that it has 256KB (not MB, KB) per processor, plus a bulk transfer mechanism to main memory. Given that model, it has to be programmed like a DSP - very little state, processing works on data streams. For games, this sucks. No CPU has enough memory for a full frame, or for the geometry, or a level map. Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio.) In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O. And, of course, Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering.
But if each Cell CPU had, say, 16MB, the Cell machines could be treated more like a cluster. Programming for clusters is well understood, and not too tough.
It's probably too late, though. Multi-core shared memory cache-consistent machines are now too good. It's not necessary to use an architecture as painful as the Cell. It's probably destined for the graveyard of weird architectures, along with data flow machines, hypercubes, SIMD machines, systolic processors, semi-shared-memory multiprocessors, and similar hardware that's straightforward to build but tough to program.
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You are right, and Sony killed any future... (Score:2)
...the Cell might have had when they locked down the PS3.
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Cell Is Being Used Exactly How It Was Designed For (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the early PS2 we would talk about what a next generation PS2 would look like. Those whiteboard diagrams looked almost identical to what Sony and IBM came up with.
The parallels between the PS2/EE/GS and PS3/Cell/RSX are almost identical:
Execution starts on the EE/PPU
Heavy/parallel computation task is spawned off to the VUs/SPUs
Light control code runs in parallel on the EE/PPU
As graphical elements become read to be rasterized they are spawned off to the GS/RSX
In a well running PS2/PS3 engine all three
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I remember reading somewhere that one of the goals in PS2 programming was keeping that DMAC running full tilt streaming data. Ah, found it, Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2000/04/ps2vspc.ars/4 [arstechnica.com]
Valves hybrid threading (Score:3, Informative)
I found this article interesting. They write about Valves approach to multi-core CPU's and game engines.
The programmers at Valve considered three different models to solve their problem. The first was called "coarse threading" and was the easiest to implement. Many companies are already using coarse threading to improve their games for multiple core systems. The idea is to put whole subsystems on separate cores; for example, graphics rendering on one, AI on another, sound on a third, and so on. The problem
No, the basic problem with the Cell... (Score:1)
...processor is that the company selling it's flagship product decided to lock out people wanting to experiment with it.
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Because those people made such progress after having nearly four years to experiment? It's time people around here quit pretending like Sony never gave them the chance to dink around with the PS3.
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...processor is that the company selling it's flagship product decided to lock out people wanting to experiment with it.
Fail. The flagship Cell processor is a more-capable unit that IBM will sell you for exorbitant amounts of money. The Cell in the PS3 is a toy version and even mentioning that it is based on cell is only marketing for the real thing to IBM.
Oh look, moderator with sand in vagina (Score:2)
I bet you didn't like that I used the word "Fail" in the modern vernacular sense. But in case you thought I was being non-factual, here is information on the real cell processor [wikipedia.org] which IBM sells for truly incredible amounts of money. I've looked up the pricing, and it is scary.
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That's gotta sting Xbox 360 developers - to have fanboys calling the chip that beat the shit out of you this gen called nothing but a 'toy version'.
The Xbox 360 is also powered by a 'toy version' of PowerPC which is a 'toy version' of POWER.
Also, I think Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are all evil, and I do my best not to give any of them money any more. That means buying everything used and not paying for Live Gold. If that makes me a fanboy, then your comment makes you my bitch. But we knew that already because you're an anonymous pussy.
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And nothing of value was lost to them. The only thing related to the PS3 that interests Sony is the selling of games, Blu-Rays and stuff from PSN. A bunch of basement dwellers installing Linux on their PS3 was an afterthought at best.
Laughable Drivel (Score:2, Interesting)
"Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering."
My god. You are repeating that Beyond3d forum lie in late 2010???
"For games, this sucks"
"Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio."
"In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O."
"It's not necessary to use an arch
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The bandwidth in and out of those tiny spu memories is great, much better than between main memory and cache on an x86 processor, or generally between cache and processor on a GPU. I don't know what anyone needs that for though.
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The SPE's aren't full CPU's, they're essentially enhanced versions of the PS2's VU's.
Yep, stream data, just like on the PS2.
You're not supposed to keep a full frame or map in there, you're supposed to stream it in and out on the fly, as the Kami intended, just like on the PS2.
"Fat Pipes (bandwidth), sm
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Xbox and PC gamer fans
Ok, seriously, what's the deal with this? Sure, there are plenty of 360 fanboys out there who say nonsensical stuff about the PS3 (and PS3 fanboys saying nonsensical stuff back), but why lump PC gamers in with them? I'm not sure PC gamers generally care one way or another which console does what graphically these days, considering that with the 4-5 years of advancements in hardware since they came out, you can now buy a video card that'll run any half-assedly (un)optimized console port at 1920x1200 at 60f
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IBM - proven in this market space (Score:2, Interesting)
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If IBM is looking to leverage their regular POWER chipset for the console market, they will probably build some screamers with them
All of the current generation consoles use IBM chips. The GameCube and Wii both used PowerPC 4xx series chips - IBM's low-end 32-bit PowerPC line. The XBox 360 uses a custom 3-core in-order PowerPC chip. The PS3 uses Cell (PowerPC core + 7 SPUs - the PS3 gets the ones where one of the SPUs failed the tests, the ones where all 8 work go into blades and supercomputers).
They could actually try to sell the Cell (Score:5, Interesting)
In the end the time window had come and gone (the developers got bored or gave up on the idea of using the Cell) before I could get even a hint at the price but I kept going for the sake of future projects. The price for one workstation with one processor was fairly similar to that of six of our cluster nodes. You would need some sort of black-ops budget where any Accountants coming close are shot on sight before paying that sort of price. An entry point machine no much different to a playstation with more memory cost a truly insane and unjustifiable price.
Re:They could actually try to sell the Cell (Score:4, Informative)
Can't buy ARM outside a cellphone? Are you kidding?
Check this out - this is just one I found with about 5 seconds
http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKND01 [makershed.com]
There are dozens of ARM boards out there suitable for DIY/embedded systems
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You're kidding right?
There's lots of ARM dev kits out there, chumby hacker board, netduino, cortex, etc.
Not forgetting where ARM came from (ARM = acorn research machine[s]?) there's an old list here:
http://productsdb.riscos.com/comp/curr.htm [riscos.com]
Then there is an desktop operating system for the above called RISCOS http://www.riscos.com/ [riscos.com]
Of course a lot of these pages are rather old now, and you'll find lots of broken links ... which can only tell you one thing....
ARM is an old cpu, only 10 years younger than the
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Really well here you go.
http://beagleboard.org/hardware [beagleboard.org]
http://gumstix.com/ [gumstix.com]
There are a lot more but beagleboard is the closest I have seen to a mini ITX board.
Just plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and you are good to go.
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That is true. I don't know about now but a few years ago you couldn't even get a pinout for the Cell processor. You had to show both IBM and Sony your business plan and your market could not impact Sony. IBM has some cookie-cutter circuit boards with a cell on them that they want to sell for big bucks, along with a big down payment and minimum quantities. The reality is that the Cell processor is not THAT great. good, but not great, and requiring a big change in the way you factor out your software design,
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odd, when we were working with cell we went straight to matrix vision and they LOANED us the hardware for about a year.. Nothing sleazy at all. IBM Also loaned us a server, as did Sony (a beautiful rack-mount job which will never see the light of day).
http://www.matrix-vision.com/products/cell.php?lang=en [matrix-vision.com]
Bottom Line - the PPC part of the Cell is rubbish, terrible IO and generally 'weak' by todays standards, the SPEs are great, but not enough memory on them (256k) for the algorithms + tables we needed to pro
Re:They could actually try to sell the Cell (Score:5, Interesting)
I can go one better: I do signal processing for a living - chewing on multi-hundred megasample/second streams of data in real time. The Cell looked like a perfect fit. We were looking at 1000's per year. Contacted IBM - sorry, not enough zeros on that number for us to sell you the chips. OK, are there any vendors that are targeting the uTCA form factor (that the Telecomms folks are are all over, so they would not have been targeting just us)? Nope, just large blades for mainframes.
I assert that IBM doesn't want to be in the chip business - at least, not "selling chips to anybody else". They don't mind making chips for their own use, but they really don't have the infrastructure to sell to anybody else.
Sony and Toshiba don't want to be in the high-end CPU market, they want to be in the mass-market stuff.
Had IBM licensed the Cell design to somebody like Freescale, they might have gone somewhere.
Sorry, but I RTFA - and what I came away with was "We will continue to support Sony for as long as Sony wants to make PS3's". I saw nothing that really said "We are going to be going someplace else with this."
The problem with Cell... (Score:3, Insightful)
... is that it lies in between ordinary x86-type multicore processors and CUDA/GPGPU, and there's not much room in between.
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It's more of a triangle. In one corner, you have general-purpose CPUs, optimised for branch-heavy code with lots of locality of reference. In another, you have streaming, often SIMD, processors optimised for non-branching code, with high throughput, such as GPUs and DSPs. In the third corner, you have specialised silicon dedicated to specific algorithms (e.g. building blocks for encryption algorithms or video CODECs).
Cell is along one side of this. It isn't particularly throughput-focussed, and it is
"IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor " (Score:1, Offtopic)
I know Slashdot is the enemy of good writing practices, so this post will be modded downto hell, but I feel I must point out that lately, the capitalization of titles of Slashdot submissions got completely out of hand. The rule is simple: if you want to capitalize your headlines, you capitalize every word except
- prepositions ("of", "to", "in", "for", "with" and "on")
- articles ("the, "a" and "an")
- and some other obvious exceptions.
On Slashdot, the editors are so ignorant that they usually capitalize each
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I think this guy is suggesting we buy some of his shoes, but I'm not quite sure.
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Perfect Cell (Score:2)
what would be cool (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be a pretty cool chip would be an 8-core chip with 4 x86_64 cores, two graphics cores, and two Cell cores. (perhaps IBM + AMD working together)
After that, build a custom Linux with MeeGo as the front end / launcher.... It would be cool if game console makers embraced Open Source for everything up to launching the games. ...and if they don't want their SDK open source, that's fine, just make the Operating System so it can launch the games, then get out of the way. Run it on two cores (for better functionality with Multimedia capabilities, ebook reading, etc.) and use the rest of the cores (2 x86_64, 2 Graphics and 2 Cells) for gaming.
As for the other hardware, Composite, Component, HDML, VGA, WiFi, Ethernet, and a headphone jack.(maybe bluetooth for wireless controllers and the ability to use bluetooth headsets)..blu-ray, card reader, and USB.
This is all off the top of my head, and would be a pretty cool gaming console, which would truly capture the home entertainment medium and make most people looking for gadgets, consoles, or HTPCs drool appropriately.
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What would be a pretty cool chip would be an 8-core chip with 4 x86_64 cores, two graphics cores, and two Cell cores. (perhaps IBM + AMD working together)
this is a bad idea because it's precisely the kind of ignorant crap that hypertransport is supposed to eliminate. Instead of cramming a bunch of crap into one package, you sell multiple packages so that people can customize their layout. Ideally you'd have the x86_64, cells, and graphics cores all communicating via HT links, and then it doesn't matter where they are physically located... but trying to put all that into one package would be a TDP nightmare at this point.
How are profits distributed? (Score:1)
Re:Whats a Future Power Road Map? (Score:5, Interesting)
You've really missed hearing about Cell?
It's a new processor architecture, IBM and Sony (and possibly others) had a hand in it. Effectively two "Power" cores and a bunch of vector processing units. It's supposed to be very very good for vector operations. For a while (a few years back now) the world's most powerful supercomputer was a machine composed of nodes containing two cell processors and an Opteron each.
It's different to other parallelisation strategies as the vector units (SPU/SPEs) allow you to parallelise stuff at an operation level, unlike just stuffing more cores into the box which is the intel/PC strategy. For games and graphics this it thought to be good, hence its inclusion in the playstation 3. It's also supposed to be good for scientific computing.
I guess you could think of it as somewhere between a CPU and a GPU, or a hybrid of the two approaches.
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Cell is a processor with two PPC cores, interfaced with a bunch of auxiliary CPU cores optimized for SIMD, each with its local memory.
Right?
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On further reading - not two PPC cores, one core with two threads using a similar (but possibly superior) technology to hyperthreading.
But yeah, essentially your short description there is correct.
Also I've looked at the top 500 list - The cell, though not the variant in the playstation, is in Roadrunner. Roadrunner is the third fastest computer on the planet.
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Of course game developers tend to be a bit more sceptical. The Cell requires a very specific way of programming (don't align your data flow to the processor's capabilities and performance nose-dives), which doesn't go over well with people who have limited time to make their game/engine work on several different platforms, most of which work roughly the same.
I attended the Games Convention Developers Conference 200
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I think the true power of the PS3/Cell will be it's longevity.
Look at the PS2. Now look at the 1st gen games for it versus some of the latest ones. The differences are huge, and they are due purely to better programming techniques (same hardware.) I've no doubt that the PS3/Cell will have a similar lifespan.
Also, I know it discussed in almost every tech generation of consoles, but this time it might be true: Is the hardware finally good enough? This may be directly influenced by the popularity of Flash-
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you are the one who sounds like a damn fanboy.
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This comes from the point of view of a casual gamer who is not concerned with having the latest and greatest but has a brother who is. I've seen the X360 perform on a large HDTV set and I've seen the PS3 perform on the same set. Both look good. The Cell may outperform the X360 by a large margin if given enough time but that remains to be seen. Right now I'd put them as reasonably close (= to so
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It doesn't matter whether Microsoft's promo videos are pre-rendered and Sony's are not; Nintendo's look like they're from ten year
one Power core, not two (Score:2)
Just FYI.
IMO this was one of the main failures of the architecture. Xbox360 developers just have to worry about parallelizing their code, Cell developers on top of that have to worry about writing code that can make use of the SPE's, let alone efficient use of them.
The Cell was designed back when Sony needed hardware that could decode their high definition blu-ray streams. I think this is why the SPEs are useful for decoding operations and little else in the gaming world.
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Interestingly, Cell was tolerant of losing SPUs in manufacture. A lot of "bad" chips would've been used as lower-end Cells for cheaper devices, while being essentially the same platform as far as developers were concerned. I don't think much came of that though. One laptop with a 4-SPU Cell, talk of a 2-SPU Cell as a video processor in a high-end HDTV. A shame, really, as they had a lot of half-dead Cells rolling off the line when they were trying to crank them out for the PS3 launch. Wonder what happened t
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But seriously, if this person has no idea what a Cell processor is, I'm pretty sure the concept of CPU optimization will be lost on them. You could say it was a new type of chip made by elves to regrow tissue and they would probably believe it. Just how out of touch would someone have to be to miss the Cell, and not bother to Google it before posting?