Will IBM Cell Really End Up in our Computers?

Information about the forthcoming IBM Cell-based accelerating cards starts to be available on the internet. As a reminder, such cards will be powered by an under-clocked Cell CPU (1.5 GHz, vs. 3.2 GHz in the PS3) to speed up HD video and dedicated computing tasks (see our previous news).
It seems that those cards will be more expensive than initially expected, and the price should rather be around 200-250 USD instead of the originally announced 100 USD. Of course, this is not extremely expensive, however, one should not forget that NVidia will offer graphic cards supporting CUDA, so being able to boost some heavy processing tasks while managing 2D/3D display and rendering, a function not available from the Cell-based cards. At the end, the Cell-based cards might join the museum of good ideas which never translated into real products; let’s hope we are wrong.