I thought long and hard about a Thanksgiving-related pun to use in this header, but in the end I couldn't find anything to fit in the title box. Thus, I shall try to put the puns in here.
So, chipmaker IBM islooked like it was planning to take the axe to Cell, the processing technology behind the PlayStation 3 console, which some opposition fanboys have called a "turkey". Unfortunately, I doubt they call it that because they think it to be fat and stuffed with deliciousness.
Ars Technica relayed details from an interview with David Turek, IBM's Vice-President of Deep Computing (cool name for a department, that), who said that the company would not be developing the next generation of Cell processor. It seemed to be more a business decision than an actual technological one, as Ars Technica's article had many big words implying that Cell is apparently quite good. Good as gravy. Eh? Eh?! Apparently all those dev diaries talking about how great the Cell is for making Uncharted 2 and Killzone and whatnot weren't completely bunk.
"But what about PlayStation?!" yell many fanboys. Not to worry. Sony reps indicated the announcements have nothing to do with the fate of the black Blu-ray behemoth, and IBM confirmed that they would continue to make chips for as long as needed. Plus, some of the core concepts behind Cell will make their way into the next generation of chips.
Besides, it's hardly time to be thinking of the next hardware cycle. The fowl in the console cockfight have a lot of battle left in them.
But hey, it's Thanksgiving, so you might be too smashed/satisfied/asleep to be reading this. Have a great clip I dug up to celebrate/lament the end of Cell.
[Update: It seems that Cell development as a whole will NOT be stopped after all, as the cycle being halted was only one part of the Cell line, a line which did NOT include the type used in the PS3. Thanks to Narishma for the clarification!]
As innovative and cool as the cell processor is, it's also in some respects a technical failure. A modern multi-core CPU has a number of different cores that act like a normal CPU as far as programming. The cell has specialized CPU cores, which require different techniques for each of them, as each is made for one specific type of operation.
For example, if I wanted to code in a shader, on a normal multicore I just make the code, but for the cell I have to arrange for the different operations to be shuffled to the different cores. It allows for faster cores for a given operating frequency, but much harder to work with, as it requires the programmer to do a lot of shuffling and extra management to take advantage of the architecture.
Sony fanboys could of course point out that, in the developing Xbox book released, MS was so impressed by Cell that they hired IBM to develop a bastardized version of it. Of course fantarded fuckwits never read anything more than a sentence so that little nugget of hilarity likely remains safe from idiot fanboy wars... for now.
From the sounds of it, the Cell development is actually ending because SCEI is instead looking to take up the POWER7 processor architecture from IBM - still an 8 core POWER processor, but something in the order of 10 times more powerful, and much more normal/less confusing for developers to code for as the cores are all fully powered. This is mostly just based on speculation. http://www.ps3news.com/forums/playstation-3-news/rumor-sony-chooses-ibm-power7-cpu-playstation-4-2012-a-108795.html
Dragonball Z is one of the shows I actually preferred dubbed because of the ridiculously high Japanese voices in the original. It just doesn't strike a chord with me as much as the English or other dubs do. Sorta like how I love Kamina's English voice in Gurren Lagann.
Did anybody notice in the article that's linked that they say "double down"? Does that mean we're going to start double-downing computer chips? Sweet. Somebody get on that.
i know but you gotta look at it from sonys point of view, a PS4 with the Emotion Engine & a Cell Broadband Engine could mean a 700 dollar+ launch. those components arent free.
Indeed. Though this is just a rumor. but it does sound like Microsoft would in fact do something like that. However now I do not understand the updated part of this article.
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11:00 AM on 11.26.2009 
