It would be interesting to see what comes out of that conference. The CELL papers are different from what was presented in ISSCC'05, which I attended. Too bad I would not be attending this conference.
From all the discussions I have been following, the programming for CELL would not be easy (SONY being aware, is working hard at it) but at the same time for massively parallel processing to an extend video games are, CELL would rock. What people do not realize is that Xbox360 is also equally difficult to program, whatever MS wants to say.
When CELL was disclosed in patents, SONY talked about streams data that needs to be processed. This is true for all the multimedia task, Toshiba demostrated, 50+ parallel decode of DVD streams. in March-April time frame. In this aspect, Xbox360 core would not be able to keep up with CELL.The xbox360 core would not be able to match CELL for processing parallel streams of independent data.
Another thing about threads, MS said it can do 6threads and all blah blah blah..., if you have continuous parallel stream of data, then are hit with penalty if want to run 6 threads. Simple reason there are only 3physical threads (i.e., core). The threading works well then one process needs to wait for the data to come and stalled, other process can work while the first process is waiting. If the first process is not waiting then, second process cannot run, so mechanism to allow both process to run is needed. This adds penalty to the first process which does not want to wait.
In comparison, all the 7SPE in CELL can take a job, so you have 7physical threads + 1physical thread in PPE, compared to 3physical threads in the Xbox360. All these points to is, under work condition where the processor has continuous streams of parallel independent data, then CELL would be rocking big time period.
Another point about multi thread programming, managing threads is not easy it requires quite a bit of planning from the programmer side. They need to do the planning, to make sure when one process is stalling, another process can run during the stalling period and then release the thread to the first process. Otherwise the first process would take more time to complete.
Now with this in mind read the CELL paper again, you can see the amount of thinking IBM, SONY and Toshiba have put in. CELL is the next step in processor architecture.
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), aber ich denke trotzdem, dass sie neben der PlayStation 3 und auch dem Revolution ein Schattendasein in Japan fristen wird.