The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

They didn’t remove it. They just ended updates for it so you couldn’t also use an updated console AND have linux support. Software isn’t free, so I people are over entitled if they expect lifetime updates.

To play devils advocate, you can sell games without building perfectly viable general purpose compute hardware and then locking it down with DRM to make it useless as such. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

The consoles that existed in the 70s and 80s were largely justified in being specialized hardware specifically for realtime rendering which had no realistic application outside the narrow scope of fixed function realtime interactive rendering they produced. In the 90s the PS1, N64, and Dreamcast were all computer adjacent with the next geration - PS2 / Gamecube / Xbox - all being perfectly functional general purpose computers that were simply crippled with proprietary software into being toys.

Since then their hardware has only gotten more generic and general purpose and the degree of their draconian platform lockdown grown to an insane degree to resist emulation and unlocking. Its a shame Valve only ever saw SteamOS as a hedge against Microsoft - if they had taken it seriously and put in the legitimate ridiculous amount of money it would have taken to breakout a console platform without the horrifying amount of proprietary bullshit going into the competitions products we might have seen that incredible amount of waste become as taboo as it deserves to be.

Honestly the worst offender is the Nintendo Switch - it is verbatim just the successor device to the Nvidia Shield Tablet, just with a grotesque proprietary operating environment and impenetrably locked bootloader. Every time I see one of those things I am struck by how absurdly wasteful it is to see someone carrying that thing and a regular tablet when Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft could all just be shipping their own proprietary DRM laden store apps on top of a freedom respecting software foundation. If you want to exploit people by depriving software freedoms while they pay you for it... I'd argue its a product of propagandized deception and manipulation, but its still people considered informed consumers buying that garbage. Its a lot less bad than entire computers, fit for a multitude of purposes, being reduced to toys.

> Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are not developing game consoles out of anything but an incredibly evil greed - they are wasting insurmountable amounts of raw materials making computers that cannot be used as computers.

I think this is a bit harsh. Is artwork a waste of good canvas?

(I guess to be fair to you here, at least canvas is a renewable resource)

Ironically, this is the kind of massive research that got Sony into troubles because it costed a ton and was hard for developers to master (SEGA felt this hard a decade prior), hence the Nintendo U-turn and Sony/Microsoft 90% mainstream hardware follow-up.

The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU, and not the GPU.

As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high performance vector processing units, and was so optimized for compute throughput it used two different floating point formats, neither of which are compatible with the IEEE754 standard that every other piece of hardware you've ever touched uses. The PS3 was the culmination of that philosophy, with the Cell being explicitly developed to put as much raw number crunching hardware in something that can still be called a CPU. It was just a single unimpressive POWER-compatible CPU core, and 60% of its die area went to specifically engineered number crunching units. This is what made it "supercomputer grade".

There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the Playstation 3 to be equipped with two Cell chips, and no true GPU at all. But it seems Sony realized during development that their philosophy had no future. Sony compromised and introduced a standard Geforce GPU. Compared to the more conventional architecture of the Xbox 360, the compromised design still had slightly more potential but it was a lot more difficult to work with for games, and more expensive to produce as well.

Starting with the last generation of consoles, homegrown graphics architectures aren't tried anymore. You can only get performance and especially good developer buy-in on commodity hardware. As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Their successors will too. The Nintendo Switch shares a chip with the Nvidia Shield TV and Google Pixel C tablet. Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me.