What if the Cell BE came out for laptops?

Would you get a Cell BE processor (Same processor used in PS3) Even though you would not be able to run windows on it (The cell is PPC64 arch)
Imagine 2 3.2Ghz cells in your laptop
if they are using it in consoles and using it in TV's Why not computers? It would be a great for gaming computers and imagine how good it would be if they opened up ALL the SPU's!

 

How about an IBM Power7 while you're at it?

 

If it came out for laptops we'd have a lot of burnt laps... doesn't the thing put out like 200 watts?

 

As far as I know, 70W or so, maybe 100W. Not too bad at all, for the amount of raw processing power it provides. (Of course, that's still too high for a laptop CPU, but it's no worse than many other desktop CPU's, so it could probably be scaled down to fit laptops)
The PS3 as a whole outputs quite a bit of power, but I believe that's also due to the GPU. From what I've seen on the Cell itself, it wasn't that bad, really.)

A far bigger problem is the fact that it sucks balls... as a PC CPU.
If there's one thing that characterizes the PC, it's, well, the lack of any one thing that characterizes it. It's the emphasis on general purpose processing. We don't need to decode 72 video streams simultaneously. We don't need to sift through terabytes of data in a database.
We need a bit of everything. A PC needs a CPU with no real weaknesses. It must be sorta ok'ish at databases, at media processing, at games, at random, unpredictable code, at memory accesses, at small datasets, at large datasets, and especially in the last few years, it must be good at scaling back when it's idling. It's ok for some computers to use as much power when idling as they do under load, because 1) the power bill doesn't matter much, and 2) they're not meant to run idle anyway. On a PC? The average PC runs idle 95% of the time. It matters. Laptops? Even worse. they *also* run idle 95% of the time, and they also have the battery to consider, not just the power bill.

The problem with the Cell is that it sucks at about 50-75% of these tasks. It doesn't help us that it can decode 8 HD movies in parallel, if it can't run regular Windows applications at a satisfactory speed. Or if it can't run our games! (And no, it is *not* good at games. Only Sony says that, and just how objective do you think they are? It can, with a lot of effort, be harnessed for *some* specific tasks involved in *some* specific games. But for most game code, it's mediocre at best. Why do you think all PS3 ports of games 1) get delayed, and 2) have no better graphics than on 360? Because it's no more powerful as a gaming system. Because developers have to fight even to keep up with the 360's CPU at many tasks.

Furthermore, the Cell is very much stuck between the CPU and GPU in a PC. It's much better at GPU stuff than a PC CPU is. But the PC GPU is even better.
It's vastly better at general-purpose CPU stuff than our GPU's are.... but our CPU's can still run circles around it at this stuff.

It was originally envisioned to function as both CPU and GPU in the PS3. The addition of a dedicated GPU was a last-minute decision, because GPU's had gotten faster more quickly than Sony had anticipated.

So in today's PC architectures, it doesn't really fit in.
And in many ways, it is about 8 years ahead of its time. In many markets and industries, that's about the greatest compliment there is.
In computers, it just means that you're trying to do something that isn't possible yet.
The Cell works, but it had to cut far too many corners, make far too many compromises. It's crippled in many ways, because they tried use a very clever and powerful (AMD and Intel have both admitted this) architecture. They just can't cram in enough transistors yet to make it worth it.

It's the same reason that AMD is adding level 3 cache today, but didn't have it 5 years ago. It's only now we have the transistors to spare, after putting in all the other improvements. They could have done that 5 years ago, and they'd have been killed, even by the P4.

Over the next decade, both AMD and Intel will migrate to something similar to the Cell. But not as long as it involves as many sacrifices as the Cell has made.

Actually, there is a PPC version of Windows NT. Or used to be, it's been discontinued now, but I imagine they could get it up and running again fairly quickly.

 

Well the Cell can be modified to be like a Cell Xenon hybrid (now that would PWN!!!) and that would run things really well it would be quad core and have 14 SPU's! with near 5Ghz of processer speed
I do know the Cell sucks at apps but it has a very high floating point and probably could do Super Pi Very well lol they just need to modify it

 

Yeah, but who f'ing cares about SuperPi on a PC?
Wouldn't you rather talk about actual real-world performance?

Wouldn't you rather have a fast gaming CPU? Stick to Core 2 then.
The xenon suffers from some of the same problems, although to a lesser extent. Its single-thread performance is horrible too, it can just run 6 of them at a time, where the Cell can do two. But each individual core is still miserably inefficient compared to, say, a Core 2 core.

*Unless* you want to run SuperPI, there's just no real point.