the cell.
Friday, March 23rd, 2007This is what the cell processor is good for. Not games, which want general purpose CPUs, and really don’t care how many gigaflops you can do since most of what they do is integer based. It’s the brute strength data crunching tools; program those SPUs and let them have at it.
It’s incredible how much more data the cell chips can handle compared to everything else. If you break it out to average FLOPS per processor type…
PS3 (cell) ~ 24.5 GFLOPS,
PCs ~ 1 GFLOP
PPC Macs - .8 GFLOPS
Intel macs ~ 2.6 GFLOPS
Linux ~ 1.4 GFLOPS
GPUs ~ 59 GFLOPS
The only thing that can compete with the Cell are the GPUs, which are obviously floating point beasts.
Granted, when you put every single Windows PC into one group, you’re clumping the new Intel Core2 Duos with the 10 year old Pentium 2s that are running in a corner, trying so hard to process one piece of data, but still - even the Intel Macs are an order of magnitude off from the Cell chips.
That is all.
