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IBM kills off Cell processor development

by on23 November 2009

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PowerXCell 8i is the last one out


The Cell processor which IBM once flogged as revolutionary is now officially dead in the water. German website Heise Online quoted IBM's VP of Deep Computing, David Turek, that the planned successor to the current PowerXCell-8i processor, slated to have two PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs, will not be released.

Some of the development work will crop up in other projects but effectively this means that Big Blue is terminating its Cell processor line and the PowerXCell 8i the last one out the factory door. Cell was supposed to be IBM's big white hope even if it was slightly slower on most things.

Sun's Niagara at 1.4GHz was more than 13 times faster than the 3.2GHz Cell at long string pattern matching for example. If the working set is tiny, then the 3.2GHz Cell CPU is roughly 50 percent faster than the 1.4GHz Niagara.

The Cell inspired both Intel and AMD to create the Larrabee and Fusion respectively. In other words, one or more general purpose cores fused with a number of stream processing units.
Last modified on 23 November 2009
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