[geeks] Apple/Intel another (pre | per )ceptive article

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 04:22:44PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 04:56:11PM -0400, velociraptor wrote:
> > This was written/pub'd *last* July.  Some of it is way
> > off base, but some of it may pretty well explain why
> > Apple kept that "secret" x86 lab.  Surely Apple had
> > to know about cell by the time Jaguar was released.
> 
> IMHO, the Cell was WAY overhyped.  Good for games, vector processing, etc,
> but bad for general-purpose computing from what I can tell.

What general purpose computing tasks do most people use that doesn't fit
under vector processing, yet needs high speeds?

For the average user, all I can think of would be the audio and video
accompanying their every day work, since certainly DB front ends won't
tend to need that.

For more professional users, vector processing would be nice, if the
quality is high enough, which I'm not looking into, but I find it hard
to believe they would justify sticking 64bit float performance into a
game chip.

For database servers, I could see the cell maybe not being quite as
good, but then those machines could have stuck with PPC instead of cell
chips. 

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/