Opinions are like imaginary friends...not everbody sees them
"You have to get going first on the PowerPC chip (inside Cell), and the PowerPC core is too weak to act as the central controller."
Okay...everybody is entitled to their opinion, but they should atleast have the courtesy to back it up with their reasoning. Why is it so weak to act as a controler? Why is an x86, or more specifically, an AMD x86 core better at task management?
Having written Cell code, and thus my own task management, I haven't had ANY problem with the PowerPC core. It runs pretty well, it's light weight and very little of what needs to be done is impacted by the lack out-of-order execution or major branch prediction.
The whole "number of viable cores limited by the OS" thing is a complete falacy as far as I'm concerned. The OS should not be responsible for managing the cores mainly because of the exact problem being mentioned....OS code is slow, and cumbersom because of all the features it has to support, and thefor not adept at handling core management.
When I write Cell code under Linux, I don't use OS functionality to send code/data to a SPU. Anybdy who thinks it should be done via some form IOCTL needs to be beaten with a wet kipper, Instead, I use the Cell SDK which accesses the Cell functionality directly, with the OS sitting on top of all that. The OS doesn't need to manage core functionality....that's just silly as far as I can tell, and leaves the system more vulnerable to attack (please, somebody correct me if they think I'm wrong).
It's no surprise that an AMD employee is giving negative press about the x86 markets biggest threat. After all, he's hardly going to say "yeah, this x86 stuff is a big pink elephant that we're stuck with but Cell rocks", is he?
Flames because this will degenerate into a flame war with all of the coder stuck in traditional development realising that they need to adapt beyond their comfort zone for the future.