Well, yes. Intel was not able to deliver fast mobile CPUs on time. So Apple decided to give up and do it on their own.
> PS3 underpowered?
Yes. It was terribly underpowered. I worked with it back then, and it was slower than a 1GHz Pentium for practical tasks. The CPU in PS3 was clocked at around 3GHz, but it had full in-order execution. So any code with branches just died.
Sony's way around it was SPUs - special coprocessors, that were even more underpowered with little local memory. But there were 8 of them, and the common data bus was pretty fast.
It worked great for graphics and for something computation-heavy like Folding@Home. Kinda like modern GPUs. But it sucked for general-purpose code.
> Also if you compare like for like, the CPUs IBM put out in 2005 with 3.2ghz had a TDP of 75W. Intel CPUs in 2005 at 3.2GHZ used 130W TDP. both used 90nm processes.
Now compare their performance for actual tasks. You'd be surprised.
Cell architecture bombed. As a result, Sony switched to a regular architecture for PS3.
>IBM loses cachet with the end of the Apple partnership, but it can take consolation in that it's designing and manufacturing the Power family processors for future gaming consoles from Microsoft, Sony and Ninendo, said Clay Ryder, a Sageza Group analyst. "I would think in the sheer volume, all the stuff they're doing with the game consoles would be bigger. But anytime you lose a high-profile customer, that hurts in ways that are not quantifiable but that still hurt," Ryder said.
furthermore, if you look past the "Intel is just too slow for the power envelope" that you stated:
>The "bad quality assurance of Skylake" was responsible for Apple finally making the decision to ditch Intel and focus on its own ARM-based processors for high-performance machines. That's the claim made by outspoken former Intel principal engineer, François Piednoël. "For me this is the inflection point," says Piednoël. "This is where the Apple guys who were always contemplating to switch, they went and looked at it and said: 'Well, we've probably got to do it.' Basically the bad quality assurance of Skylake is responsible for them to actually go away from the platform."
So both of the claims about cycles/J being the reason are just sound bite ahistoria.
>The PowerXCell 8i powered super computers also dominated all of the top 6 "greenest" systems in the Green500 list, with highest MFLOPS/Watt ratio supercomputers in the world.
that's 2008 - when apple originally announced they'd complete the move to intel.
PS3 underpowered?
>According to Folding@Home in a statement on its website; “Using the Cell processor of the PS3, we should be able to do more folding than what one could do on a PC. Also, since the PS3 has a powerful GPU, the PS3 client will offer real time visualization for the first time.
Also if you compare like for like, the CPUs IBM put out in 2005 with 3.2ghz had a TDP of 75W. Intel CPUs in 2005 at 3.2GHZ used 130W TDP. both used 90nm processes.
You're fractally wrong. I could actually keep going with every claim you made and put paragraphs in. I'm sorry.