is the Cell Processor good for game development..you betcha..read on

[joeorc]

i have heard this since the Cell processor was introduced and people then claimed that the Cell Processor was not good for game developers because
its "not a general purpose processor" or the SPE's are not good for game's

well guess where the main processor manuf. are heading with their processors for games...


News Hardware
Intel Reveals More on the Larrabee
Techtree News Staff
Aug 4, 2008
Intel shared details with the press about their discrete GPU chip - Larrabee at San Francisco. As part of Intel's Tera-scale research program, the Larrabee will be a standalone graphics chip to deliver stream processing (GP-GPU) performance, enabling full CPU programmability and support for OpenGL and DirectX APIs carrying many x86 architecture-based cores. However, Intel didn't share the number cores in Larrabee and how they'll be different from the graphic chips used by Nvidia and AMD-ATI.

Based on the Pentium processor core design, the Larrabee chips are scalable from 8 to 48 cores. Larrabee's design is enhanced with vector processing unit, multi-threading, 64-bit extensions, and pre-fetching. The x86 design will offer full support to current graphical APIs. With support for highly parallel computing applications, developers can develop new highly specialised graphics APIs as well as generic CPU APIs for new features.

Larry Seiler, chief architect of Intel's visual computing group, said, "What the graphics and general data parallel application market needs is an architecture that provides the full programming abilities of a CPU, and the full capabilities of a GPU together with the parallelism inherent in graphics processors. This is exactly what the Larrabee provides, and is a practical solution to the limitations of current graphics processors."

Larrabee's architecture has 1024 bits-wide bi-directional network, 512 bits in each direction, for faster communication with low latency between the cores.

Due for release in 2009 or 2010, Intel intends to target the high-end PC gaming market and industries, such as natural resources exploration, that need multi-parallel processing and graphics support. Larrabee will compete with the standalone GPU majors like Nvidia and AMD. However, as Intel executives admitted, it's uncertain whether it will become the preferred choice over gaming consoles.

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/I...91786-581.html

sound's just like another processor i know of....

o'l ya the Cell...

but..but its x86 its going to be better than the Cell processor for games... "standard response by fanboys from the xbox360"

it just goes to show STI know just like the others where game processors are headed.