[NoDeceit]

"The multicore design will give software developers tremendous flexibility, Kahle said, allowing them to run multiple operating systems on the same chip and experiment with variations on grid computing."
"While the PlayStation 3 is likely to be the first mass-market product to use Cell, the chip's designers have said the flexible architecture means that Cell will be useful for a wide range of applications, from servers to cell phones."
Taken from CNET.com It would seem to me that putting it into a Mac is a possibility.
al

[montgomery_burns]

In reply to:

---

Imagine a Japanese businessman picking up his Sony phone to call his business partner in America. The Japanese speaks Japanese, and the American hears American English...in real time! Or the Japanese could call his other business associates in China, or India, or wherever. Each party would enjoy instant language translation available only with a chip such as this.

---

Somebody has been watching too much Star Trek. Actually, what I would like to see is the ability to search for spoken words within an audio file, in much the same way we search for words within a text file. For example, you could play an old Macworld keynote and search for every instance of someone saying the word "jagwire".

[HappyMacMore]

Atari was a player in the mutiple processor transputer market of the eighties with the ATW-800, now it's Sony with multiple cores, what's next Nintendo multi-cell nanites.

[webman2k]

"Somebody has been watching too much Star Trek."
When the original series aired, people would say the same thing about those futuristic commuicators (cell phones / two way / nextel), the fancy ray guns (portable lasers), and the talking computer (now available on just about every shipping machine - give or take a software install).
Why is thinking that a new processor will allow for instant live translation so far-fetched? He's not saying that it's going to live translate into an alien languae by extrapolating speech patterns (that's Cell version 5). I watched the dashboard movie on the Apple site, and how the little translator widget translated as the person typed. There's live text translating right there - and that's just a little widget. If a whole processor's resources were tied to this specific function, I have no doubt that even current processors would be able to handle processing speech, translating it, and the reading the output in real time.

[montgomery_burns]

In reply to:

---

"Somebody has been watching too much Star Trek."
When the original series aired, people would say the same thing about those futuristic commuicators (cell phones / two way / nextel), the fancy ray guns (portable lasers), and the talking computer (now available on just about every shipping machine - give or take a software install)

---

Exactly, And history seems to have a way of repeating itself. Perhaps you should be telling this to the people on the other discussion who keep saying a Powerbook G5 is not needed and is too impossible to build.

[Tau_Myx]

Why is thinking that a new processor will allow for instant live translation so far-fetched?
Instant live translation is impossible. Even if you had infinite computing power, you could never do much better then todays best human translators, who generally wait for the speaker to get a complete idea out (several sentences sometimes) before they start translating. One reason is that the meaning of a word in a sentence is often heavily dependent on the words after it.
for example, you might start a sentence (in english) with:
I'm going to run...
In English, "run" has a number of different meanings. In other languages, those meanings might not translate back to the same word. The word for "run" (...around the block) might be totally different then "run" (...a computer program). If the translator tries to start speaking before your sentence is finished, the person you are talking to might end up thinking that you plan to roll a CD ROM around the block.
This is a spur-of-the-moment example, I'm sure others could come up with ones where a word isn't defined until dozens of words later.
There are all sorts of other traps that human translators need to know about too, such as grammer.

[Peter Cohen]

In reply to:

---

There are all sorts of other traps that human translators need to know about too, such as grammer.

---

Spelling too! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[dke]

I created a detailed report on this processor based on the information I could find...
http://www.igeek.com/CellProcessor.pdf
http://homepage.mac.....pdf-binhex.hqx
http://www.mymac.com...llProcessor.pdf