The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

Post by IronBacon » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #23

grogenaut wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

Post by OldHand2018 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #58

lozaning wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not running 7+ cards on a mining rig you're probably doing it wrong. The higher the number of cards you run in a rig the more you can distribute the cost of the non mining hardware (HD, mobo, cpu, memory) across cards. A mobo that supports 8 cards might be double the cost of a board that supports 4 cards, but it prevents you from having to buy a second cpu, a second hard drive, second psu, and more memory t…

The last time I spent 15 minutes doing a possible ROI calculation on a GPU based Ethereum mining system, about a year ago, I came to the conclusion that the upfront cost of buying the GPUs alone, plus the electricity (entirely ignoring the cost of a dedicated mining purpose motherboard and cpu/ram, power supply, etc) would not have a reasonable payback period. Even if the electricity was 1.5 cents a kWh, and cooling…

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #60

zanny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If consoles were sold at a profit what you say may make sense. However building an open platform means you need to devote resources to it both from a capital perspective and opportunity cost. Driving demand towards the hardware, instead of software and licensing costs on a negative margin product is a pretty sure way to run a company out of business.

Post by forrestthewoods » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

DCKing wrote: post #62

forrestthewoods wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Console hardware is not really interesting anymore if you ask me. Agreed. And that’s a good thing. PS1, PS2, and PS3 were all underpowered. I’ll never forgive the PS2 for holding back games for 7 years. Grumble grumble. PS3 may technically not have been slower. But if it takes 2x the effort to get a 10% improvement it is in practice. Everything’s a PC now. Which means the focus can be on making good games instead o…

I disagree any of them were underpowered. The PS1 and PS3 arguably produced the nicest graphics of their generations - the PS1 because its competition was compromised in their own way, and the PS3 due to sheer brute force. The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extrem…

Post by close04 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #48

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #3

> 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 PS3's CPU was a single general-purpose core and 6 SIMD coprocessors. It was crap for creating games (and a pain in the ass to develop for), but it was great for pure compute. By comparison the 360 used a trio of a similar general-purpose core without the SIMD processors on the side[1] had significantly less pure compute power. [1] but with better built-in SIMD: the PS3's general-purpose core had a single internal…