It would be awesome if you could install Linux on modern Xbox or PS4 consoles and use them as PCs...
The Xbox One already runs UWP apps. But I guess not Win32 or a standard Windows desktop?
The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
21–30 of 172 posts
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#22This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…
To play the devil's advocate, Sony is in the business of selling games, their cosnoles were just a means to that and since they were selling the hardware at a loss, selling more of it to people who will never buy games was bad for their business model.
Didn't they sell a bunch of PS3s to the US Air Force for research purposes?
I'm sure that military personnel enjoy games as much as the next person, but it's probably not why they bought the machines.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#23This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…
(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…
My recollection is that the PS3/Linux thing was a failed tax dodge, because that meant you could classify the system as a general purpose computer instead of a game console. When the EU decided to categorize it as a game console anyway, they killed the Linux project.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#24> the PS4 can’t easily be turned into a cog for a supercomputing machine. “There’s nothing novel about the PlayStation 4, it’s just a regular old PC,” Khanna says. “We weren’t really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4.” The article doesn’t really explain in detail the difference that made the ps3 an attractive buy for making super computers over regular PCs. Can someone elaborate?
The processor in the PS3 was very different. It was called Cell. It had 9 cores: 1 general-purpose processor and 8 stripped-down, hot-rod processors. They were tied together by a fast bus. I think the cores could even talk to cores in other boxes more efficiently than could be done with x86 processors. Making a supercomputer from PS3s was 10 times cheaper and would run 10 times cooler. --- https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/analysis/the-playstation-...
DISCLAIMER: I am not a chip expert. I threw together this summary after reading several articles.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason was cost. Have fun convincing management to allocate resources to develop and support another SKU tailored for researchers.
So what? Don't need much difference in hardware, it was only a firmware change.
Firmware changes that relax the security of your hardware require a lot of red tape and raise much fear in management.
SONY is infamous for going overboard on DRM.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#26It was a cute way to get a Cell processor running Linux for an order of magnitude less than any other option, during the brief window where that processor looked like it was going to be future of high performance CPUs. (Anyone else here have the misfortune to work with LLNL's Roadrunner?). But then IBM killed it, and Nvidia came along and ate the market.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#27This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…
I'll never buy another Sony console again after they removed the ability to run Linux on the PS3. It's one of the reasons I bought one and I used it a lot.
Do you think that Sony is having executive board meetings worrying about a few Linux users who won’t buy their consoles?
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#28The entire interest in this came from the fact that Sony was selling PS3s at a loss, hoping to make up for it with game sales. They were willing to put up with people buying them for compute for a little bit for marketing but it was never going to be sustainable system.
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#29This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…
Plus they eventually got dinged for this because they had inexplicably advertised the Linux support, so removing it turned that into false advertising. Owners of the classic PS3 got a chunk of $ from a class action settlement.
Correction: the lawyers got a chunk of money....
Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
#30This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…
(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…
Yeah, that sounds about right.
As someone who was on the dev side of the fence at that time one of the areas where Sony was pretty poor was the devtools. Other than some hardware capabilities of the profiler Microsoft blew away everything else that Sony had.
While running Linux on it was pretty neat, I wonder what the opportunity cost was to other parts of the development experience on the platform.