Cell processor?

dbzkid

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ok i have a question about the cell, i heard it was really designed for doing simple tasks really fast and not complex tasks, and Intels were designed more for complex tasks, is any of this true?
 
The Cell processor made for the PS3 (which will be used on other products) is a pararell processor I believe, which is different to a standard processor, yes.

Heres more information on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_microprocessor

"Due to the nature of its applications, Cell is optimized towards single precision floating point computation. The SPEs are capable of performing double precision calculations, albeit with an order of magnitude performance penalty. However, there are ways to circumvent this in software using iterative refinement, which means only the values are calculated in double precision when necessary."
 
If its a paralell processor then it can do lots of small tasks at the same time rather than 1 complex task
 
o0o0o, im sorry im a bit of a noob (ok im really a noob about hardware but this is where we all start out correct?) now when u say "Cell is optimized towards single precision floating point computation" what do u mean, but again thanks a lot for the help you gave me
 
Its just a quote a made from the link :p

"The speed of floating point operations is an important measure of performance for computers in many application domains. It is measured in "megaFLOPS" (million floating-point operations per second), or GigaFLOPS, etc. World-class supercomputer installations are generally rated in Teraflops."

So its just fast at carrying out standard single rates of these floating point tasks, which is basically anything a computer can do involving binary numbers (0's and 1's), which is what a computer works in...

To tell the truth, I don't entirely get it either.

Now get your head around this:

http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lug/node74.html
 
Whooooo!!!! thats some insane math, these engineers must be a beast at math to do this, (im still only a jr in highschool)
 
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