bingle

Well, that's one of its main purposes, but not the ONLY one. Sony has already said they'll be putting it in a vareity of devices, including high-end TVs, and Intel and Toshiba wouldn't be involved unless they saw other future applications for it. In fact, I read an article recently that suggested it would be great for scientific computing (which does a lot of floating-point stuff), or if application design is restructured, even as a general-purpose PC processor.

Of course, there's the rub: just like in the Emotion Engine, Sony's made the processor fast by making it simple, which moves a lot of the hard work into the software. In order to really get PC-like support for it, someone would need to design an operating system that abstracts the details of farming out work to the sub-processors.

But it's still plausible that it could grab some more general computing applications, simply because PCs have to go *somewhere* - Intel's been stuck speedwise for a while now, and multi-core chips look like they're the future of any power increases we're going to see. So applications and OSes have to start getting more multithreaded anyway - why not go the Cell route instead of the two-core Pentium route? The initial learning curve might be greater, but since you can just add more and more Cells in a modular fashion, it's got more growth potential than Intel's method.

Bingle