Re: CELL processors considered interesting?

[Tom Locke <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From what I understand the Cell has one general purpose core and 8 SIMD 
cores.

Please correct me if I'm wrong... as I understand it this makes it an 
entirely different beast to the multi-core Transputer that was once on 
the cards. Better suited to crunching large data sets than general 
purpose CSP style concurrency? (the vendors certainly seem to be 
pitching it like this - video-game graphics, 'multimedia workstation')

While we're on the subject, did anyone else read this interview with 
Alan Kay:

http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273

(tip: click 'printer friendly format' for a human friendly format. OK I 
could have linked you right to that page, but that's such a good tip - 
remember it!)

"Neither Intel nor Motorola nor any other chip company understands the 
first thing about why that architecture was a good idea.

"Just as an aside, to give you an interesting benchmark—on roughly the 
same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at 
Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore’s law has given us 
somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So 
there’s approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost 
by bad CPU architectures.

"The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture 
is—that Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false."

(So that would be a false myth? Is that a double negative? Sorry...)

Anyone got any background on that architecture?

Thanks,

Tom.