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The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

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Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#111

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

ljm wrote: post #110
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-vend…

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.

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.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#112

Post by Gracana »

wmf wrote: post #93
hyperman1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am taken aback a bit by this characterisation: And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony. Sony has a massive internal conflict of interest by being both a…

I have a feeling that many people who complained were not affected because they either never used Linux or they only used Linux and could just not upgrade. I understand that in theory Sony should have fixed their hypervisor bugs and kept OtherOS working, but I also understand that the world isn't perfect.

Why would many people complain if they were not affected? That seems like an odd conspiracy theory.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#113

Post by Narishma »

dehrmann wrote: post #106
DCKing wrote: post #49

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 p…

> As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Does this mean the Xbox was pretty revolutionary for showing that you really can make a console with commodity hardware?

Didn't they have to kill it only a couple of years in because it wasn't cost-effective? IIRC it was sold at a huge loss that they never managed to get back.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#114

Post by thanatropism »

Gracana wrote: post #112
wmf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that many people who complained were not affected because they either never used Linux or they only used Linux and could just not upgrade. I understand that in theory Sony should have fixed their hypervisor bugs and kept OtherOS working, but I also understand that the world isn't perfect.

Why would many people complain if they were not affected? That seems like an odd conspiracy theory.

http://slashdot.org

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#115

Post by vagab0nd »

capableweb wrote: post #2

When reading through this I was sure this was about Folding@Home but turns out this was a different project! Strange that Folding@Home isn't even mentioned, if I recall it correctly, you could install Folding@Home easily via the store on the PS3, and a normal user could contribute. The Verge article seems more focused on customized machine (rooted to run Linux and stored at location) instead of using the standard OS…

Off-topic, what's the current state of protein folding simulation? Is it still an unsolved problem? It was mentioned pretty often as a hard problem but I stopped hearing about it a couple years ago.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#116

Post by Narishma »

znpy wrote: post #77
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?

> Just a regular old pc It's literally there: the PS4 is amd based pc (bulldozer architecture iirc) packaged in a fancy case and with a nice gpu.

Jaguar, not Bulldozer.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#117

Post by Jasper_ »

anthk wrote: post #104
Jasper_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. Xbox was approached from the "let's make a DirectX Box" angle, from commodity PC hardware, and it wasn't until the PS3's initial huge cost blunder that Sony realized they needed to go the commodity angle. > There's a persistent rumor that the Cell was so powerful that Sony had intended for the…

>The weird PS1/PS2/PS3 were because of Japan's heavy arcade culture, where quirky hardware/software designs were the standard. MSX, PC98. The Nintendo uses a standard 6502 CPU with a PPU and the Mega Drive used the uberknown M68k.

I mean, the PS3's Cell uses PowerPC. We're not talking about the ISA here, but the architecture and bizarre stuff coming along with it, like the NES PPU.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#118

Post by sudosysgen »

Koshkin wrote: post #71
zozbot234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't console hardware be sold at a profit? Make up for the increased sale price by bundling a rebate on the first X officially-published games the customer buys. Then everything after that is pure profit for the console vendor.

The more likely you are to buy the (cheap-ish) hardware, the more likely they are to sell you more games - at the regular price. Also, there is this balance which is unrelated to the cost of making the hardware, the balance between the buyer’s wanting to actually use the hardware, since it was bought not too cheaply, and not making the price of hardware too high and scare off the potential buyer.

This doesn't matter anyways, consoles haven't been sold at a loss for almost a decade.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#119

Post by ljm »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #111
ljm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#120

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #14
ascagnel_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no reason they couldn’t have sold a slightly less locked-down system to researchers at a higher price point —- Microsoft did exactly that with unsold X360 Kinect units (and bundled in a USB adapter) for medical research.

The reason was cost. Have fun convincing management to allocate resources to develop and support another SKU tailored for researchers.

You don't need to - just license it out to a third-party systems integrator.
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