http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23852



article quote:
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"Kutaragi, known for the bold stroke and the grand vision, swung for the
fences from the get-go. "We want to do something that has never been done
before," he told Davari and a group of IBMers at their first meeting. "let's
work together to change the world." The movie The Matrix had just come out,
and Kutaragi relished itspremise of a world that is actually a giant
computer simulation "Think about creating a crude version of that world," he
said, "where millions of people can play in a realistically rendered virtual
Tokyo or New Yourk City as if they are really living there." Creating that
magical realm, Kutaragi told the team, would require a chip 1,000 times as
powerful as the one in the PlayStation 2. The IBMers tried not to roll their
eyes. They tended to like all that Matrix stuff, but when it came to
1,000-fold chip boosts, they thought Kutaragi was out of his mind."

"Davari tapped to lead the project was Kahle...He had designed IBM's first
dual core chip, the Power4, and was just coming off a project that produced
the IBM chip that powers Apple's G5 computers. "I don't want to do the
normal stuff," he says with a shrug. Normal obviously want what Kutaragi had
in mind. Still, one of Kahle's first moves was to talk Kutaragi down from
that fantasy of a 1,000-fold power increase. Kahle figured a goal of a 100-
fold boost from one chip generation to the next, having rarely if ever been
achieved in the history of semiconductors, was ambitious enough."


"Kutaragi was incredibly demanding and repeatedly sent Kahle back to the
drawing board. At one point about a year into the project, Kutaragi made the
team scrap the whole system structure and start over nearly from scratch.
Another time Kutaragi decided he wanted two more cores. Why? "He just wanted
to squeeze the engineering team," expains Masakazu Suzuoki, Sony's top Cell
engineer, wringing his hands as if strangling a snake. "it hurt your head,"
Kahle recalls. Making the pain worse: The team still had to deliver the chip
on the original schedule."


"To this day, few people even inside the allied companies know the details
of Cell's development or the high hopes its backers hold. The Cell engineers
are still not supposed to talk about much of their work to anyone outside
the Austin facility. One day the air-conditioning broke down in the lab, and
as the temperature soared, the engineers propped open the doors. Word got
around. The company had to post guards to turn back rubbernecking colleagues
eager for a glimpse of what was going on in there."




"IBM, in paticular, says it's making headway in defense, medical imaging,
internet switching, and industrial inspection equipment. The company
suggests that the chip could be especially useful in crunching the mammoth
amounts of data the military will collect as it develops so-called
network-centric operations, where heavy armor is replaced by more perfect
information--such as torrents of broadband video--that must be processed on
the fly."
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note that the Cell processor going into PlayStation3 is "only" about 35
times more powerful (in floating point) than the Emotion Engine CPU in
PlayStation2.

even *if* Sony and IBM were to unleash the 8th SPE (only 7 SPEs are active
in PS3's Cell CPU) and unleash the full clockspeed that Cell is capable of
( 4 to 5 GHz ) it would still only be, roughly, a 50x increase over PS2's
Emotion Engine. therefore, that would still not even come close to the
ambitious but fairly reasonable goal of a 100-fold increase over PS2's
Emotion Engine CPU that IBM / Kahle suggested that Kutaragi and the
Cell-team aim for.

.....let alone Ken Kutaragi's original goal of *1000* times the performance
of Emotion Engine, which was insanely unreasonable and just pure fantasy.

oh well, poor Kutaragi ...he can try again with PS4 !