Comment by api

I implemented some evolutionary computation stuff on the Cell BE in college. It was a really interesting machine and could be very fast for its time but it was somewhat painful to program.

The main cores were PPC and the Cell cores were… a weird proprietary architecture. You had to write kernels for them like GPGPU, so in that sense it was similar. You couldn’t use them seamlessly or have mixed work loads easily.

Larrabee and Xeon Phi are closer to what I’d want.

I’ve always wondered about many—many-many-core CPUs too. How many tiny ARM32 cores could you put on a big modern 5nm die? Give each one local RAM and connect them with an on die network fabric. That’d be an interesting machine for certain kinds of work loads. It’d be like a 1990s or 2000s era supercomputer on a chip but with much faster clock, RAM, and network.