Comment Re:They could actually try to sell the Cell (Score 3, Informative) 124
odd, when we were working with cell we went straight to matrix vision and they LOANED us the hardware for about a year.. Nothing sleazy at all. IBM Also loaned us a server, as did Sony (a beautiful rack-mount job which will never see the light of day).
http://www.matrix-vision.com/products/cell.php?lang=en
Bottom Line - the PPC part of the Cell is rubbish, terrible IO and generally 'weak' by todays standards, the SPEs are great, but not enough memory on them (256k) for the algorithms + tables we needed to process the data.
In the end optimizing for intel & SSE3 and making the algorithms multi-core capable was less pain:performance ratio than working on the Cell which would have required all the additional work of managing DMA to/from the meagre memory on the SPE.