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Originally Posted by Baiame  I may have misunderstood you, but if 4 or 8 general-purpose cores confer no advantage (they do), of what POSSIBLE use are 7 coprocessors that are only useful for floating-point calculations?
The cell is only impressive in terms of floating-point performance, and anyone who programs knows that float operations end up being a small minority for most programs (yes, including games). My ~$900 C2D 6850 w/ 2 GB of DDR2 800 RAM (cl4) and a stock 8800GT w/ 512 MB of VRAM PC is in practice a more powerful machine than the PS3. Of course, that's not to say it could come close to emulating the PS3. |
The other SPE's can handle AA, and lighting, because of the lack of shared ram, and because the RSX cannot handle AA. While the others can be used for everything else (loading, etc.)
If you google raytracing (highest from of rendering) you can see that via the cell processor only they can render things in linux. Given time, the cell processor can utilize it's SPE's to producer higher rendering in combination with the RSX card, maker higher quality games, while still using the SPE's for AA, and loading. Producing higher quality games, and faster loading times.
Your pc, graphics wise is more powerful, but if it came down to raw computing power the cell would beat it.