Cell's SPUs and IXP's microengines aren't data-parallel any more than a regular CPU. They're minimal CPUs with local RAM and fast connectivity between each othe

Cell's SPUs and IXP's microengines aren't data-parallel any more than a regular CPU. They're minimal CPUs with local RAM and fast connectivity between each other (usually a FIFO queue). Every single one of the CPUs was independent and happy to run as many branches and/or memory accesses you want without significant performance penalty, unlike modern GPUs. So yeah, you could put different objects on different CPUs if you want. Except that that's not where the bottleneck in either energy or computation is. Remember that that local RAM needs to be powered if it's to retain state (ignoring FeRAM), so CPUs are no longer free; you have to commit objects back to main DRAM before switching off the CPU. And so you've just reinvented caching and might as well just run on a fast few-core CPU anyway.