On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Ken Fuchs wrote:

> The Cell processor with its central PPC core and eight Synergistic 
> Processing Units (SPU) is an interesting alternative to true multi-core 
> CPUs.  Linux runs on the central PPC core and the central core controls 
> what the eight SPUs do.

I found this...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/07/0257221&tid=136&tid=137&tid=106

...and it makes me think that Linux on the cell processor will be very 
effective for some uses, but those are probably a few years in the future. 
Think so?

I'm also wondering how it will work for I/O intensive apps.  It looks like 
it could be a killer number cruncher if only a little memory is needed, 
but if a lot of memory is needed, won't the Power core have to feed the 
SPUs and there will be a bottleneck?  I think it would be amazing for some 
kinds of analyses, but for many of the big memory-intensive jobs I do it 
it will not be better than other architectures.  Just guessing - what do 
others think?

Mike