Jaws: Apulet = Software cell.
The Visualizer was supposed to use APUs (the same APUs as the ones in the CPU, the Broadband Engine).
The 3D graphics acceleration for texture sampling, AA, etc... was to be provided in the "Pixel Engines" part of the Visualizer.
The internal solution I agree was quite surely based on the Visualizer model, but it was not the solution chosen by SCE's management even before nVIDIA won the contract (the chirping of the birds indicated that the preferred solution was coming from this "partner" which I doubt it was CELL based).
Whether the definition of a GPU is CELL based or not, I'm basing that on whether they can run 'software cells'.
Which would imply possibly dynamic partitioning of the workload between the CPU and the GPU of the system.
Hofstee's presentation mentioned present, relatively short-term future (PlayStation 3 and the CELL WorkStation basically) and longer-term future.
He mentioned moving away from texture maps completely which might seem a bit radical if you look at it under the whole new approach to graphics kind of way... REYES/PRman still use textures all over the place (over 30% of rendering time is spent in I/O and a lot of that time you are fetching and sampling textures).
What he said could be seen under a more realistic light though: he mentioned the old-old way "just take a simple model and paste a texture on it to fake detail" and when he says that he wants to move away from that he is not saying that Normal maps, Displacement maps, "regular" texture maps, etc... are not going to be used any-longer (as I said you do not do that even in REYES based off-line rendering systems).
He meant it more in the following way: CELL will allow us to increase even more the pure geoemtric detail and to make a realistic/physics based use f it for animation, lighting, etc...
Doing things the hard way, subdividing a purely flat surface down to tons of micro-polygons per pixel when a couple hundreds or more triangles, a texture map and per-pixel lighting can achieve the SAME effect (in some cases it will still happen) is not a sign of genius... it is a sign that you could have saved processing time taking the short-cut in that occasion and used that time to subdivide opther surfaces better, add more lights or enhance the scene some other way if possible. If you can afford dice everything down to micro-polygons, but I am not sure if we are at that point in real-time graphics where no short-cut is not worth being pursued at all (off-line CG has the advantage in over-all frame-time... a flexible amount of hours versus a fixed amount of milli-seconds).
I think that over-all SCE's management has chosen what they believed to be the best solution for their PlayStation 3 strategy which still remains as PSOne was, as PlayStation 2 has been and as PSP seems to be... a very aggressive yet well planned out strategy.
