Comment Re:Unobtainium (Score 1) 208
What made Cell a nightmare to program for was the SPU's local store. The local store is great for performance, but a pain to program since the programmer had to explicitly move data back and forth between main memory and the local store (hardware designers back then all thought compilers could solve their problems for them--see Itanium). MIC is cache coherent. All memory references are snooped on the bus(es). MIC programmers don't have to worry about what's loaded in memory and what is not. An instruction merely has to dereference a memory address, and the MIC hardware will be happy to go fetch the needed data for you, automagically. It was not so with Cell.