IBM's Octopiler, or, why the PS3 is running late

"All afternoon I've been slogging through IBM's 25-page paper on their newly released Octopiler, and now things are clearer to me. See, Cell's greatest strength is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. And Cell's greatest weakness is that there's a lot of hardware on that chip. So Cell has immense performance potential, but if you want to make it programable by mere mortals then you need a compiler that can ingest code written in a high-level language and produce optimized binaries that fit not just a programming model or a microarchitecture, but an entire multiprocessor system. This isn't just a tall order, or even a doctoral dissertation. It's a generation's worth of doctoral research. Meanwhile, the PS3 is due out in 2006," says Hannibal at Ars Technica.