fnucknut : You need to read a bit more about CPU architecture....
PC's and Laptops will pretty much always you general purpose architectures due to the varied nature of the tasks they perform. The Cell is no match for a general purpose in the normal computing arena... and when it comes to specialised tasks, the normal CPU is no match for Cell.
Just some info
http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell1_v2.html
So, what is Cell Architecture
Cell is an architecture for high performance distributed computing. It is comprised of hardware and software Cells, software Cells consist of data and programs (known as jobs or apulets), these are sent out to the hardware Cells where they are computed, the results are then returned.
This architecture is not fixed, if you have a computer, PS3 and HDTV which have Cell processors they can co-operate on problems. They've been talking about this sort of thing for years of course but the Cell is actually designed to do it. I for one quite like the idea of watching "Contact" on my TV while a PS3 sits in the background churning through SETI@home, actually this is rather unlikely as I’m not a gamer but you get the picture...
According to IBM the Cell performs 10x faster than existing CPUs on many applications. This may sound ludicrous but GPUs (Graphical Processors Units) already deliver similar or even higher sustained performance in many non-graphical applications [GPU10] . The technology in the Cell is similar to that in GPUs so such high performance is certainly well within the realm of possibilities. The big difference is though that Cell is a lot more general purpose so can be usable for a wider variety of tasks.
The Cell architecture can go further though, there's no reason why your system can't distribute software Cells over a network or even all over the world. The Cell is designed to fit into everything from (eventually) PDAs up to servers so you can make an ad-hoc Cell computer out of completely different systems.
Scaling is just one capability of the Cell architecture but the individual systems are going to be potent enough on their own. An individual Cell is one hell of a powerful processor, they have a theoretical computing capability of 256 GFLOPS (Billion Floating Point Operations per Second) [GFLOPS] at 4GHz. In the computing world quoted figures (bandwidth, processing, throughput) are often theoretical maximums and rarely if ever met in real life. Cell may be unusual in that given the right type of problem they may actually be able to get close to their maximum computational figure.
This isn’t by luck or fluke, it’s by design. The Cell’s hardware has been specifically designed to provide sufficient data to the computational elements to enable such performance. This is a rather different approach from the usual way which is to hide the slower parts of the system. All systems are limited by their slowest components [Amdahl's law] , Cell was designed not to have any slow components!
