[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]... X86 is that old, but it's just a basic architecture, not an implementation of it's architecture such as the Cell which has the same performance that it had when it launched almost a decade ago. It's like complaining about a late P3's performance just because it doesn't perform like today's best processors. Of course it's getting phased out by now because it's no longer among the fastest processors.... They don't need to count for anything to you. They are still profit.[/citation]The Cell is an architecture, and don't take my word for it: . The SPEs were designed to be scalable in number easily.
The one in the Roadrunner is actually an enhanced version of the one in the PS3. IBM, Toshiba, and Sony all lost interest in improving it. The Vita using ARM is a prime example of the lost interest.
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]The Cell can suck for any other kind of processing... Simply use it for vector processing and it's great (for its time).
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Porting software hurts efficiency even more and to a greater degree at that and the severity is likely due to the difference in operating system/software/hardware between current consoles and current PCs.If consoles went X86 and were specifically designed to be more port-friendly, then this would be much less of a problem.
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Heck, even the military has a PS3 based super computer.[/citation]There's two supercomputers, but how many more? Also, that's actually one of the problems with the PS3. Sony hinted that it's orders of magnitude faster than the Xbox 360, so people designed games for the Xbox 360 thinking porting wouldn't be a problem. It turns out that the 360 in quite a few cases was more powerful.
Also, the CPU being in a supercomputer doesn't mean much for video games. It shows that it makes a good supercomputer for those cases it was made for, but doesn't necessarily translate into video games. This is Tomshardware, and by being here, you should know about frame rate benchmarks and how they better show off performance compared to corporate PR