Re: IBM "Cell" processor

[esmith <esmith@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> February".  I don't think computers will start shipping (not in
> any volume) by then.  PS3's, perhaps, but not general-purpose
> computers.

After these remarkable claims of perfomance it's probably best to take a "wait and 
see" approach but, the fact that workstations do exist right now ( the URL you posted 
speculated that developers already have cell workstations ) makes this a curiosity, 
because some of the hardware features do seem to match well with some of the DF goals.

coordinated press releases from IBM and Sony
http://www-03.ibm.com/chips/news/2004/1129_cell2.html
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200411/04-1129BE

ARMONK, NY and TOKYO, November 29, 2004
IBM, Sony Corporation (Sony) and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) announced 
today that they have powered-on the first Cell* processor-based workstation.
The prototype workstation is the first computing application planned for the 
highly-anticipated Cell processor.
The companies expect that a one rack Cell processor-based workstation will reach a 
performance of 16 teraflops or trillions of floating point calculations per second.
. ..