Powerslave wrote:

You could do insane real time rendering, animation, and visual effects on just a cell with the PPU, 3 SPE/SDRAM pairs and FLEXIO->1GB XDR2. You could use anything that had modern shader support to handle frame buffers and maybe some physics. I'd actually break the bank on a new Mac if they returned to RISC with a setup like this.

Sony kind of knew that, but then decided to change the configuration of the PS3, and add a GPU, rather than use the cell for its functions.   I guess they figured that 8 cores, 1 reserved, and one for redundancy, would not be enough. 

The XB360 has SIX cores total (three dual core setup) at 3.2Ghz, and that's what the PS3 uses for gaming, SIX SPEs. So, they could have used the other two cores to do the GPU functions, but then there's risk of overheating, and not being able to have a backup SPE incase of a real time failure, ot off the line failure.   Then again, the CELL is capable of speeds over 4Ghz, so they could have split the CELL; four cores at 4.xGhz for games, and either two at 3.2, or all six at 4.X Ghz...  They limited the cell's SPEED and PERFORMANCE by stepping it back, and relying on a MUCH SLOWER GPU!!!

Plus the General Purpose core in the CELL shows the most use on a thermograph, no matter how many SPEs are in use.  IF the General core goes, the entire CELL is useless.

It will be interesting to see what CPU they come up with the next time around.

Yeah the Parallax Propeller chip has a similar setup. They have a processor for native control and functions then 8 cores with similar DMA and stuff than the CELL.

Also instead of starting another thread: I noticed on the CECHH01 Sony added PSB security especially around the pwr/rst and eject censors. They have the traces from that block stop and go to a middle bus layer that's not visible from either side of the PSB. I guess this is to hide the bus logic order to further prevent people from reverse engineering the system. I was gonna trace them this morning to see where the first initialized chip was. I think it's visible on the other systems.