Anyone else second guessing Apple's jump to Intel now?
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Apple's decision to switch to Intel was best because of x86. With Intel, Apple has boot camp and can bring over many more switchers than if it had stayed with IBM.
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No, not at all. The 6ghz power6 chips would NEVER have found their way into an Apple system, even if they had stuck with IBM. The issues with heat management would have been just as bad (if not worse) than the Power5s, which caused Apple a great deal of headaches.
Besides, IBMs update schedule is far slower than Apple's or Intel's, meaning that a (lack of) chip development would seriously slow Apple's growth in the market.
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This is cool, but considering IBM's chip yields, there will be one mega-PS3 we'll all have to time-share for six years.
Wow, that is fast, but i don't see anything using all of that power soon, or at least nothing for home use.
The thing is, x86 support can and could be a gateway into Apple and a good fit for the laptop performance, but they can also maintain performance of desktops by sticking with the PowerPC architecture. There's nothing stopping them from flip-flopping at any time with OSX. As far as I'm aware, most of the binaries will work on either platform.
Hopefully this leads to better and cheaper blu-ray players.
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The CELL processor has nothing to do with Bluray. The only connection between the two technology is that the PS3 uses both of them.
Hoping that better CELL processors would lead to cheaper Bluray players is like hoping a more powerful internal combustion engine would lead to cheaper satellite radio.
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Well, I was gonna say, if the internal combustion engine was cheaper to produce, the engines in the machine that ferry the space shuttle to the pad, the trains that bring the parts and the other residual costs would be reduced. In that sense, putting a satellite in orbit would be cheaper and the service fees could be reduced.
..that or the CEO of the radio companies will get bigger checks because they did so much to reduce the cost.
It's not x86, the vast majority of people will still not be interested.
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Windows is not the only OS in the world. OSX should be able to run on either x86 or PowerPC architecture (not sure about Cell) and Linux has kernel support for the Cell as well.
Just because x86 seems to be the only architecture that Intel and AMD use right now, the steps AMD is taking may step the industry away from x86 instructions slowly (which is a good thing.) If you brush this off as meaningless because you can't put it in your PC tomorrow, you have a very short sighted (read Microsoft-centric) view of the industry.
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>>The CELL processor has nothing to do with Bluray.
The only connection between the two technology is that the PS3 uses both of them. Hoping that better CELL processors would lead to cheaper Bluray players is like hoping a more powerful internal combustion engine would lead to cheaper satellite radio. Actually both Sony and Toshiba are planning on using the cell as a decoder for Blu-ray/HD-DVD players.
The reason is quite simple, they need cheap mass-produced processor that can decode Mpeg2/Mpeg4 H.264/VC-1 at 1920x0180 resolution in realtime.
This will pave the way for cheaper PS3's netx year, same clock speed, 65nm process.
Same performance, less heat (not that PS3 gets very hot anyway), less noise (not that PS3 is already almost silent). Smaller heatsinks, lighter constrution. a 65nm based PS3 will seriously reduce the losses Sony make on the PS3, allowing a cheaper pricepoint or consumers.
what is everyones guess one what this chip is used for first?
No way PS3 gets a new CPU. They couldn't afford to fragment the market like that.
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It would be the same chip, just a different process. I wonder how the Cell Yield is doing these days.
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Yeah this is going to push the market in the right direction as far as rendering goes.
Hopefully it performs like it says.
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