Interesting. Just like we predicted several years ago.
The winners in any APU contest will be the ones that can leverage economies of scale. At a few hundred dollars per unit, the Cell is likely to dominate due to the PS3 volume anticipated. The ATI, and if nVidia comes out with Quadro Plex in time, systems will also be quite relevant. Several thousand dollars per APU (ala current Virtex 4/Altera pricing) is a non-starter.
I like telling people that if you design something to fail, often times, it will. In this case, the pricing model of thousands per APU won’t fly. Just ask all those hundreds of millions of Itanium2/Itanium buyers that many pundits predicted, without regard for pricing considerations (Itanium2/Itanium based systems were and are unrealistically priced).
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[...] Joe from scalability.org points to an interesting article. Apparently, ATI is moving into the field of stream processing. In this post, I will tell you a little about what stream processing is, what your graphics processor has to do with it and also what problems I see with it. But let me start by having a little fun with their announcement: ATI has invited reporters to a Sept. 29 event in San Francisco at which it will reveal “a new class of processing known as Stream Computing.” [...]