Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

From what I have seen disclosed so far about Cell it isn't
apparent to me how it is a material improvement on countless
previous attempts to harness many processing elements on
a chip. For example, the Texas Instruments 320C80 (4 DSPs
+ RISC + shared memory + crossbar switch + sophisticated
DMA/ memory controller) the architecture was *very* difficult
to program and most apps never came close to theoretical
peak performance. The second issue is problems with big
performance requirements have massive datasets and that
means a bottleneck getting data on and off chip. I remain
very sceptical about Cell achieving success outside of video
game consoles and perhaps special purpose computers.