[Axiom-developer] cell processor

[root]

Sony, Toshiba, and IBM are getting close to announcing the Cell processor.

I've been following this with interest as

  "The first Cell based desktop computer will be the fastest desktop
   computer in the industry by a very large margin."

  "Cell is going to turn the industry upside down, nobody has ever
   produced such a leap in performance in one go and certainly not
   at a low price"

I've been muttering about what I call the "PetaMachine", that is, a
machine with a petabyte of disk, a gig of memory, and a terahertz
of cpu. This is the machine I expect to have on a desktop in 30 years.

The Cell processor has the potential to deliver that kind of horsepower
within a MUCH shorter time span.

This article gives some idea from the patent application information:
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html

So, what would you do with a petamachine? How will a computational
science platform use such horsepower effectively? 50K element matrix?
1M term polynomials? Petaflop-per-second floating point? Massively
pipelined graphics? Symbolically model a whole bridge?

I can store all of written mathematics on this machine (estimated to
be less than a terabyte and i have a petabyte). I can massively
search the literature allocating dozens of processors doing speculative
searches (think clippy on drugs). Hugely fast graphics allows me to do
the crystal project (many views of the same problem thru different
facets all kept up to date in real time). 

Why it may even compile axiom in under an hour :-)

Clearly we need to dream "in the large".

Tim