Richtig said Fred!

According to HPCWire.com the Cell processor in the upcoming PS3 does indeed pack some very high performance computing capabilities. They compare it in multiple scientific applications where number crunching is all the processor does, and the results are impressive even compared to the current batch of 64 bit processors like the Athlon 64, the Itanium 2 and even the Cray X1E (that’s a supercomputer). Ok here’s a hint about the results, the Cell does not win all the benchmarks all the time, sometimes the Cray X1E is a bit better, but if you put the benchmarks in comparison to the pricing of these different processors, well the Cell wins them all. Haven’t I told you the PS3 was dirt cheap as a linux supercomputing workstation on May 16th. Here’s a single chart from the paper published by the members of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division. This chart compares Fast Fourrier Transformations in the different processors (FFTs are used in Digital Signal Processing very extensively, to convert MP3s for example), check the second column for actual Cell Performance:

You might want to read HPCWire.com’s article on the Cell Processor.
If you want to read Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division’s article on the The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing (PDF)
If you want to learn more about Fast Fourrier Transforms (FFTs), visit Wikipedia.org.

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