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IIRC, it came to be because Sony and IBM tried to make Cell the next big thing in supercomputing. But the concept proved to be a massive hassle to program.
by digi_owl 10y ago
IIRC, it came to be because Sony and IBM tried to make Cell the next big thing in supercomputing. But the concept proved to be a massive hassle to program.
- djsumdog 10y agoI remember articles about the massive racks of PS3s in Linux clusters for people who wanted to use Cell for large parallel computing. Did Sony/IBM every actually release viable/affordable Cell hardware outside of the PS3, or is Cell pretty much dead now?
- ianhowson 10y agoCell is dead. There were a few similar machines -- Intel IXP comes to mind. They were universally difficult to program and did not provide a significant performance advantage once multicore x86 became cheap. ARM chips took the many-independent-cores end of the market, GPUs took the wide-SIMD end, and may history show that the Cell approach was a failure.
- shinymark 10y agoOne funny side effect of this was that dev kits for the PS3 were rack mounted 1U (?) units. As a game developer this was ridiculous because we each had one of these on our desks, usually with a tv sitting directly on top of it. Thankfully this was changed to something reasonable on PS4. The PS4 dev kits are pretty cool looking IMO.
- micheljones 10y agoSony's main motivation in providing OtherOS functionality was, as always, money. By being able to run alternative OSes PS3 was classified as a computer and not a console for tax purposes, and Sony had to pay less tax because of that. I'm not sure what the actual numbers are tho, so someone else feel free to chime in.