So why haven't we mentioned IBM's newly-announced Cell processor yet, you ask? Good question. Well, actually, no-- it's sort of a crappy question, to be honest, since the obvious answer would be that we're perennially about four days behind the rest of the world when it comes to not-quite-so-current events, so finally raising the topic of the Cell chip today is actually right in line with what we laughingly refer to as our current "production schedule." But actually, there really is another reason we haven't brought it up yet: talk of processor design bores the freakin' pants off us.

Consequently, we decided to sit on the topic until such time as enough was known about this spiffy new chip to determine whether we'd finally have to break down and use terms like "element interface bus" and "copper interconnect"; after all, if the Cell is destined to find its way into the Power Mac G6, we'd probably have to bite the bullet in the interest of topicality. But we've got some great news! While the Cell (or part of it, anyway) may indeed be based on a PowerPC-like design, Ars Technica notes that while the Cell's PPC core "does have a VMX unit," it'll probably be "comparable to the Altivec unit of the first G4"-- meaning, about a zillion times slower than Apple needs right now. The Cell is a totally stripped-down chip, and as such, Apple would reportedly need to do a ton of optimization to make its code run well on the thing, so if such a leap happens at all, it's probably years down the line.

More to the point, though, the Mercury News reports that the first Cell chips "will have 10 times the processing power of comparable Intel chips," "can independently work on 10 different programs simultaneously," contain "the equivalent of nine processors," "will be able to process 256 gigaflops," and "might cost $70 or $80 to make"-- and "eventually the technology could pack the power of a supercomputer in a handheld device." (AtAT sources further note that the Cell can also cure all types of cancer, smells like home-baked brownies, and is manufactured entirely out of pixie dust and love.) Let's see, here... small, cheap, and blazingly fast enough to grind Intel's offerings into a fine powder-- nope, Apple won't be going anywhere near this puppy. We're saved!

Oh, sure, the editor of the Microprocessor Report says that Apple "could use the new chips in future Macintosh computers," but clearly he's unfamiliar with Apple's modus operandi; remember when the Mac stalled out at 500 MHz for something like thirty years while Motorola performed an exhaustive comparative anatomical study in hopes of learning how to tell the difference between human buttocks and an elbow? Heck, even the G5 isn't all it was cracked up to be-- we're still 17 percent shy of that 3 GHz we were promised by last summer, and as MacInTouch reveals, a 1.8 GHz iMac G5 with stock settings actually performs surprisingly close to a 1.2 GHz eMac in many ways. (By the way, if you've been holding out for a PowerBook G5, you may want to take a look at those benchmarks; we suspect you'd be waiting a long time for only marginally more performance. But that's just us.) So if Apple does use the Cell, you can expect all of those massive performance claims to evaporate practically overnight.

Meanwhile, we get to ignore the Cell for the time being-- but if you're really itching for the geekspeak we're so relieved not to have to fake right now, you definitely want to head over to Ars Technica and revel in their in-depth technical analysis. "The actual architecture of the Cell SPE is a dual-issue, statically scheduled SIMD processor with a large local storage (LS) area"... yeah, whatever-- we'll be over here with a copy of Fox in Socks.