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Mercury puts Cell processor on a PCI-E card

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Although it's early days for Cell it should have a fairly rapid take up for compute farms etc. As its based on a lot of Power technology there's not too much difference in terms of code. A lot of the Top 500 supercomputers are running Power or similar CPUs like Blue Gene and so moving these kind of applications to Cell is not as difficult as porting to a whole new architecture.
 
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Soldato
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It's the same as nearly any other add-in coprocessor such as the Clearspeed programmable processors. Having a processor accessible through a driver rather than through firmware means that one can ignore silly decades-old x86 compatibility and seek optimum performance. It's the same reason why GPU manufacturers can change processor architectures every few years while CPUs have been straining to improve x86 for twenty years.
 
Soldato
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Zefan said:
Ummm is it just me, or is the Cell in a VERY VERY early stage of its life? Jeez Louise stop trying to make out that I'm stupid, it's a fact that the cell is in its "infancy".


Well I would suggest you dont make yourself sound stupid, infantile and infancy are two seperate words with completely different meanings.

If you dont know the correct meaning of a word I suggest you dont use it


edit - didnt mean to sound harsh or rude or anything
 
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