Añado:
General purpose desktop CPUs are not designed for high performance vector processing. They all have vector units on board in the shape of SSE or Altivec but this is integrated on board and has to share the CPUs resources. The APUs are dedicated high speed vector processors and with their own memory don't need to share anything other than the memory. Add to this the fact there are 8 of them and you can see why their computational capacity is so large.
Acaban de definir la aceleradora 3D.
If there is a law in computing, Abstraction is it, it is an essential piece of today's computing technology, much of what we do would not be possible without it. Cell however, has abandoned it. The programming model for the Cell will be concrete, when you program an APU you will be programming what is in the APU itself, not some abstraction. You will be "hitting the hardware" so to speak.
Un ensamblador extraño para tareas paralelas... pues va a programar el Tato como no añadan abstracción, que la era de la GameBoy ya pasó.
Y luego lo llaman procesador de propósito general cuando no tiene ni memoria virtual. ¿Qué esperan que corra? ¿MS-DOS? ¿CP/M?