> vox wrote:
> There's more to the PS3 than just the Cell.

Actually, it's me who wrote this. Vox just quoted it.

> considering there's limited amount of SPE's available for use, if they're all reserved,
> you probably would still want your program to run

Wouldn't there be some kind of multitasking on the SPEs, managed by the PPE?

> Why didn't [...] Nintendo [...] switch to Cell?

"Why a PPC750? Well, first of all, the Espresso has to be fully compatible with the Broadway to run Wii software. Several people have pointed out that many PowerPC cores are essentially fully backwards compatible for user software. However, Wii games run on the bare metal, without any OS. This means that the CPU needs to be 100% compatible at the system/OS level too, down to the smallest detail of the highly model-specific special-purpose registers. Wii software regularly messes with registers such as HID0-HID4, which are Hardware-Implementation Dependent registers. Additionally, the PPC750 line is the only range of PowerPC processors that implement Paired Singles, an (outdated) SIMD implementation that was introduced with the Gekko on the GameCube and which is not compatible with modern PowerPC SIMD, such as AltiVec. These processors also implement other GameCube/Wii-specific features, such as the Write-Gather Pipe (used to send commands to the GX) and the locked L1 cache and DMA that were discussed in the talk. On top of that, because the Espresso runs at the clock rate of the Wii in vWii mode (and no faster), instruction timings must be identical (or possibly better) in all cases, lest some Wii games run slower on vWii mode than on a real Wii."
http://fail0verflow.com/blog/2014/console-hacking-2013-omake.html

> ask nVidia to do graphics drivers for Amiga [...]. But THIS (getting license from Sony)
> easily makes the top of the crazy ideas list!

Well, according to Bill McEwen, Amiga Inc. had a "co-marketing and development Agreement with nvidia" and Sony wanted "to have Amiga [referring to OS4 here] available on" the PS3 ;-)

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/wawdce/2:2007cv00631/143245/35/4.pdf (page 7)