Look, I’ve worked in Silly Valley. We (cisco) investigated using IBM’s Cell technology seven or so years ago. They’re bleeding edge stuff, and not just for their CPU’s. You won’t see much of it in a general purpose desktop, because, quite frankly, the cost of the entire system (chip to software) is lower on x86 platforms than with Cell. But if you have a job that can parallelize well, they’re the best game in town, bar none.
Most desktop software hasn’t done well at multi-threading because most programmers don’t know how to design good multi-threaded software. Let’s put aside the considerations inside the OS, which are getting better and better understood of recent, and it appears that Apple is improving in 10.6. Let’s just talk of how well the applications from the thread API upwards, can take advantage of multiple cores/CPU’s. The answer is “not well” and the fault doesn’t lie with the hardware guys designing the multi-core chips like Core [2] Duo, or Cell. The problem rests with the application programmers.
Being a retired (20+ year) engineer in the computing industry, recognize antiRepulicrat as another techie who does for-real product engineering, ie, someone who is a tad more than a ‘fanboy.’ To me, a guy who had been around the block a few times in high tech, you’re completely missing the point here, and I have to say that antiRepublicrat has been far more patient with you than I would be.
I can tell you’re unfamiliar with IBM’s Microelectronics Division, their products and how large they are. I can tell you for a fact that they’re not going away anytime soon, and that they sell far more silicon than Apple peddles. You just don’t see it, because you’re not familiar with them and you’re equating their output with IBM’s moribund personal computer product line.
This amount of silicon that IBM ships is before we take into account the vast numbers of custom, bleeding-edge chips that IBM fabs for third parties, like Juniper, cisco, etc. They have the Juniper, cisco or other name on the package, but they were fab’ed by IBM - because IBM has one of the two most advanced fab lines in the world. When you have a 20-million+ gate fab, and you want it at bleeding edge clock speeds, there’s one place you go: IBM.
You can call this a success, ignore the wise decision of Jobs to dump IBM as their chip provider, and hope IBM eventually develops some way of better accessing the multiple cores on their own chip, but right now the fact is Apple is soaring and if they develop a way of better programming multiple cores than IBM has been able to despite all the endless Cell hype, IBM will have even more egg on their face. And considering HP has already blown past them as the biggest computer company in the world, despite IBM's ballyhooed partnerships with Chinese and Japanese, they're already wearing quite a bit.