David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 8/2/05 wrote:
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>David Wang has finished up a third article on the CELL microprocessor at Real World
>Technologies. The third article examines some recent revisions to the CELL processor
>and theorizes on the cause of these changes, inconsistencies in the claimed computational
>power of the PS3, the CELL programming model and the power characteristics of CELL.
>
>The address for the article is:
>
>http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT072405191325
>
>
>Kudos to David for this great read.
>
>
>Enjoy,
>
>
>David Kanter

Yes, another fine job. So with 7 SPEs we can say for every cycle the SPEs provide 2 DP FMADD and the PPE 1 DP FMADD giving 6 DP flops/cycle. 3.2 Ghz gives 19.2 peak DP GFlops which means for reference that I2/P5 could match this peak at 4.8 Ghz although how much a Cell could sustain in practice is not certain. Coincidentally by having 3 PPEs the Xenon in Xbox 360 could match that DP figure with its SP rate being 76.8 Gflops vs Cell's 204.8 so it doesn't look so outclassed as one would think given Cell's hype. I have also heard development Cell kits are only at 2.4 Ghz. Anyway they both sound like great distributed computing clients I hope Sony and Microsoft allow them to be used in that ancillary fashion.