How Does The Cell BBE Compare To The Quad Core Proccessor?

May be...

The cell processor has one control core that the OS runs on that can either run things on it's own, or if coding is done properly, can relay the information to other 'cores' that only have a bus line to the main core, the main core is the only point of access that the processors have to the rest of the system.



In a quad core system, each core has it's own connection to the system memory, each core can run the operating system, and run its own jobs. If you want to run 4 processes that use single threads, this would be the way to go since each could run on it's own core and have access to the entire system.



The cell system can provide multiprocessor power at a fraction of the cost because you only have to have the parallel cells communicate with the main core and not the rest of the system. For home users, the typical quad core system is better because you tend to run a lot of single-threaded applications. The cell technology is being used ina couple supercomputers because it can be easier to maintain and you can get way more cores for the price.



If you're trying to compare price vs. performance of a PS3 vs a quad core linux system, the quad core system would be the way to go. The PS3 was very attractive when it first came out because they were selling the hardware at a loss, so a lot of scientists bought them up and ran linux on them for cheaper than a new PC. A modern Core 2 Quad or Core i7 system would blow away the PS3 in terms of performance. The cell architecture does not handle multiprocessing in the typical way that an x86/amd64 system would, so you cannot use your typical multithreading libraries and you would have to rewrite all of your code for that architecture. Nothing has proven the cell architecture better than x86/amd64 architecture, and a lot of its hype has gone away.



If you look for resources on the cell processor, not much has been done since about 2007. It was a hot topic when the PS3 came out because it was a cheap mulitcore processor, but now that you can buy quad core PC's for cheaper, and add on a bunch of nvida cards, nobody bothers with them as much as they used to.

Both are different architectures... Cell is optimized for gaming whereas a Quad Core is mainly used for an OS. The Cell has 8 cores (or SPE's).... In terms of calculations performed per second... A Cell is damn fast. The main use of processor is for multi-threaded purposes (meaning running the applications faster)... A Quad core only supports the GPU for graphical intensive purposes whereas the Cell can itself turn into a GPU if required... Hence even though a PS3 only has 256MB GPU, it can run the best looking games like Killzone 2, Uncharted 2 (just see the video... mind blowing), MGS4...



In short both cannot be compared. In OS running purposes, Quad Core is the best whereas a CELL is a processor created from scratch only for gaming.



Go to below link for a few common comparisons between a Quad core, A Cell and a 360 Xenon processor.

It doesn't. The quad-core has only 4 SPE's doing random things, The Cell BBE has 8 SPE's: 6 of which are the main processing units, 1 reserved for the PS3 operating system, and the last one which is locked for future uses. The Cell can do about 2 trillion calculations per second, and runs at 3.2ghz.

It compares pretty damn good.