Death of the Cell processor

Question

Hi,

in the last times I heard lots of people claiming that the Cell processor is dead, mainly due to the following reasons:

a) lack of support in the new playstation 3, as the user can not install linux b) the increasing processing power of the GPU's and its costs sinking c) the existence of a unified programming approach (openCL) for different GPU's and not for the CBE (well today was announced for the Cell!) d) carency of real world examples of use of the cell (apart from the academic circles) e) global feeling of unsuccess

What do you think? If you started two or three years ago to program the cell, will you continue on this or are you considering switching to GPU's? Is a new version of the cell coming?

Thanks

Answer 1

I'd say the reasons for the lack of popularity for cell development are closer to:

• The lack of success in the PS3 (due to many mistakes on Sony's part and strong competition from the XBOX 360)
• Low manufacturing yield, high cost (partly due to low yield), and lack of affordable hardware systems other than the PS3
• Development difficulty (the cell is an unusual processor to design for and the tooling is lacking)
• Failure to achieve significant performance differences compared to existing x86 based commodity hardware. Even the XBOX 360's several year old triple core Power architecture processor has proven competitive, compared to a modern Core2 Quad processor the cell's advantages just aren't evident.
• Increasing competition from GPU general purpose computing platforms such as CUDA

Answer 2

If you started two or three years ago to program the cell, will you continue on this or are you considering switching to GPU's?

I would have thought that 90% of the people who program for the Cell processor are not in a position where they can arbitrarily decide to stop programming for it. Are you aiming this question at a very specific development community?

Answer 3

Why did Cell die?

1) The SDK was horrid. I saw some very bright developers about scratch their eyes out pouring through IBM mailing lists trying to figure out this problem or that with the Cell SDK.

2) The bus between compute units was starting to show scaling problems and never would have made it to 32 cores.

3) OpenCl was about 3-4 years too late to be of any use.