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Berkeley paper assessing the IBM/Sony/Tosh Cell cpu for scientific use:

"Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency," the authors wrote. While their current analysis uses hand-optimized code on a set of small scientific kernels, the results are striking. On average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors, despite the fact that Cell's peak double precision performance is fourteen times slower than its peak single precision performance. If Cell were to include at least one fully utilizable pipelined double precision floating point unit, as proposed in their Cell+ implementation, these speedups would easily double.

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/671376.html

The great potential of Cell keeps being confirmed (even though it might be harder to program for). This is why I speculated about a year ago that cell-alike features will make it to x86 processors. So far I have been proven wrong.

Regards,

Rink