kengreen wrote:Ibm announced phase out of Cell development. Sony removes OtherOS from PS3 line. PS3GRID is not going to write software for new problems. Graphics processors continue to develop higher GFLOPS. I think it is the end of an era. However, the Cell processor brought us to the heterogeneous multicore platform of the future and provided a cheap "supercomputer" to play with.
To be honest, I think the writing has been on the wall for the Cell for quite a while. As ambitious as the Cell processor was, it was probably doomed to be a niche player right from the start. ATI & nVidia have just made too many strides in GPU performance to require a strange, mixed-mode architecture like the Cell.
Plus - nVidia, in particular - has made coding for GPUs much easier with their CUDA architecture. It supports C natively, and there are 3rd party extensions for Python, FORTRAN, Java and MATLAB.
It's a shame PowerPC isn't as popular as Intel for desktop computing. I would really dig a system based on the Xenon in the 360.
Cheers,
Paul