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One thing I saw somebody suggest in a discussion about cell processors stuck me as a very good idea: Why limit cell processors to being simply general-purpose processors? Imagine a PCI-X card that has a couple cell processors on it. With the appropriate drivers, programs (like 3D games, media encoders/decoders, etc) could send work to the cell card that it is best at, while keeping the x86 backend for the general-purpose work. Since cell is designed to be so scalable, if you need more power, just plug in another card. An application like this could theoretically render the GPU market obsolete. Motherboards would come with a high-speed frame buffer (basically a block of RAM mapped to pixels on the screen), and you'd buy cell cards to handle your 3D graphics. With a fast interconnect (possibly a special slot akin to AGP) that has a direct connection to the onboard framebuffer, it would make upgrading your "video card" a much less costly task! No more clunky SLI or slot-restricted upgrades. Buy a cell card, and when the latest game is too much, just buy another one and add to your existing horsepower.
::dreams:: man...that would rock so hard.
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