Re: PlayStation 3 - 16 trillion floating point operations / second

> Finally, "when put inside powerful computer servers" means the Cell 
> people are probably talking about more than one Cell chip at a time - 
> probably *much* more - but the reporter has failed to recognise this 
> fact and/or make it clear to the public.  It's not at all unlikely 
> that they're talking about multiple thousands, in which case it would 
> look rather silly if they *didn't* come up with performance in the 
> teraflops.  The hardware to do teraflops, however, is rather unlikely 
> to find it's way into a consumer games console any time soon.

Follow-up:  here's an extract from a Register article.

> As for the Cell-based workstation, it's clearly only at the prototype 
> stage, IBM and Sony having come up with an "experimental model".
>
> Still, it packs 2 teraflops into a standard (presumably) rackmount 
> box, apparently, with what sounds like multiple, multi-core chips 
> operating as a kind of cluster-in-a-box configuration.

So it's obviously less than a teraflop per chip.  Being POWER-based, 
however, it seems my analogy to the G3 for the integer portion wasn't 
too far off, although it would seem the whole chip is more like several 
bastardised PPC970s stuck together.

Which begs the question:  how on earth are they going to make a 
"several PPC970s" chip cheap enough to put in a games console?

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from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
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