Once the Unix kernal has been ported for the cell will we then see a contender to the Conroe. Its probably gonna be a while until AMD gets it ducks in a row and I see this as a prime opportunity for the Cell to get its' foot in the door, so to speak.
The really great thing is Sony already has an established pc and notebook market with the VAIOs. Sony already writes its own software and there will certainly be software architects porting their own programs over to the cell.
Finally we should see some real magic in the marketplace. Unix and Linux will probably gain share again Windows, and AMD will have a friend (although Sony will still be a competitor) against Intel. But I believe the irony of all this will be Apple sneaking in the backdoor with a killer Mac machine running the Cell at its heart, put AMD out of business and cause Sony to kill the VAIO line of computers.
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Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn! - Humphrey Bogart
Once the Unix kernal has been ported for the cell will we then see a contender to the Conroe. Its probably gonna be a while until AMD gets it ducks in a row and I see this as a prime opportunity for the Cell to get its' foot in the door, so to speak.
The really great thing is Sony already has an established pc and notebook market with the VAIOs. Sony already writes its own software and there will certainly be software architects porting their own programs over to the cell.
Finally we should see some real magic in the marketplace. Unix and Linux will probably gain share again Windows, and AMD will have a friend (although Sony will still be a competitor) against Intel. But I believe the irony of all this will be Apple sneaking in the backdoor with a killer Mac machine running the Cell at its heart, put AMD out of business and cause Sony to kill the VAIO line of computers.
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Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn! - Humphrey Bogart
All architechture arguments aside......
porting UNIX to cell will have no impact on Conroe which lives in the relm of Windows.
it would be competing in environments that use systems that hold many (>8) Power chips, Xeons and Opterons, Sparc. and it also would competing with only the segment of that market that uses UNIX.
Porting Windows to cell isnt going to happen anytime soon, MS wont waste money on that unless it translated to increased revenue somehow, and intel and amd are already serving the market quite well with proven platforms supporting 1 instruction set - x86.
Sony is not going to put Cell in their laptops and desktops running UNIX, noone is going to buy enough that to make it financially viable. Consumers will ignore it completely, look how many ppl havent switched to OSX and thats alot easier to switch to. Sony is also not going to sink money into building thier own OS to run on such a system, look at Linux, thats already maturing, and still its ignored in the mainstream.
I'm sorry i just cant continue, u have to be joking, please tell me u're joking.
Do u ever wonder if there is some sort of ""insane, spur of the moment, but incredibly wrong"" thought filter in our brains but that somehow it gets bypassed for some ppl??
A Toshiba reference design for a Cell based motherboard...maybe there is some demand after all - the only problem is that this is dated 9/23/05.
Note the ten diagonal chips above the PCIe 1x slot - Rambus XDR, if anyone cares...
I agree, great find!
it doesnt say what OS its designed to run or what use is intended (media server?)
Quite powerful, but also quite specialized. i hope it can be put to good use in what ever are it excels in, its a very interesting design and i'm sure it will be inspiration to other processor designs to come.
You're probably right; I forgot to mention that Cell was probably targeted for a niche market, yet in the article, they said it had other uses:
Quote :
Earlier this year Toshiba showcased its own TV-set based on the Cell processors and capable of processing up to 48 high-definition video streams at the same time.
Why you would ever need to process that many different video streams on one TV set at the same time is beyond me.
Toshiba also provides software, which includes operating systems (such as Linux), middleware and software development tools along with its reference set.
It implies that there are other operating systems - what could they be?
Probably other *NIX OS's they would be the easiest to port it they have linux for it already. Also i am sure they would have a proprietry OS developed for it also, for specialized application.
If you look at it as the heart of a super home entertainment system (not unlike XBOX 360 ) it makes more sense to have a proprietry OS that wont be tampered with and just needs to do one set a functions till it stops working.
Frankly my dear Scarlet, I don't give a damn, either.
Clark Gable
Just kidding. I was wondering of the Cell would get anywhere as a PC architecture. It's actually the only way to compete with Windows. A Cell based machine wouldn't be "IBM-PC compatible" so there would be no "Windows Tax."
Note the ten diagonal chips above the PCIe 1x slot - Rambus XDR, if anyone cares...
Humm... I fail to see the SATA ports...
Cheers!
Its a reference model; if Toshiba is serious and the demand is there, they will implement SATA. Since Cell would be used primarily in servers...what about SCSI?
