The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

Re:The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers by DoofusOfDeath on Saturday December 07, 2019 @10:05PM (#21734118)

I prototyped some physics modeling on the Cell BE. Having Linux on it was a huge help, but it definitely was an odd beast to program for.

One thing that made it practical to work with was that we could install Linux on a PS3.

When Sony retroactively killed the ability to install Linux, they did more than make PS3 irrelevant to supercomputing. They made me deeply skeptical of relying on a technology with a single-vendor gatekeeper.

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Re:The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers by ljm on Saturday December 07, 2019 @10:09PM (#21734126)

For the sake of the environment and not throwing away hundreds of thousands of perfectly functional computers I hope they will change that situation. If nothing else, it's going to be a hacker's dream to play with such a unique chipset. It shouldn't die out.

I'd love to poke into it myself. The only barrier is the language you have to use to speak with it.

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Re:The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers by DoofusOfDeath on Saturday December 07, 2019 @10:13PM (#21734141)

I suppose there are multiple measures of environmental-friendly. I would guess that the ps3 offer pretty bad flops per Watt compared to newer hardware.

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Re:The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers by ljm on Saturday December 07, 2019 @11:29PM (#21734333)

I'm more curious about the subsequent death of PowerPC. Back in the day we had a decent amount of hardware running on that chip.

But on benchmark levels Cell would be competing on different grounds to an X64 and a few PCIe slots right? I've not a clue, I'm curious but I know I don't really know what I'm talking about after this point.

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