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0 pointsdeepnet10y ago0 comments

Not most but many.

It was a subsidised platform with great specs, the cheapest linux box available and ran on a tv, never mind free console & media player. A lot of my student contempories bought it solely for Linux as it was the cheapest way to a Linux platform.

I cite the Condor cluster using 1760 PS3s, once the 33rd fastest super-computer in the world. There are many other published Playstation clusters (PS2 also). The cell processor was highly desirable and very powerful for the price.

I will always thank Sony as 'otherOS' allowed me to evangelise Linux & indeed computing to many families who never considered owning a computer. To kids passively consuming games I could show the power to create them with Linux and turn a passion for gaming into a passion for coding - I was not alone in this.

'OtherOS' use was both significant, socially important, and moreover printed on the box when bought - this seems contractual & IMHO Hotz was in the right to re-enable it.

Sony have world leading engineers and tech, that perfection should deliberately be downgraded for non-engineering reasons breaks my heart.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Sadly I feel I can no longer own or evangelise Sony devices until Hotz can too - it was quite unjust behaviour.

Hotz did not lose in court, the courts agreed with Hotz, but his exclusion from Sony ownership was coerced against his will, uncivilly, nonetheless.

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paulmd10y ago

Yes, the subsidies used to factor into that bigtime. The hardware was sold at a loss, in the expectation of making a profit on controllers/accessories, games, subscriptions, etc. That's no longer the case nowadays - the XB1 and PS4 are both being sold at a profit (or at least not a loss).

I think the trend away from specialty processors with speciality GPUs attached like the Xenon [note: different from Xeon] in the XB360 and the Cell in the PS3, to commodity Jaguar x86 APUs with onboard iGPUs is a big reason behind that. Honestly the XBone is really no different than going out and building yourself a mITX PC on the FM2+ socket, for Linux purposes. Nowadays you're better off with something like the Raspberry Pi for intro-to-computing, although I am a big fan of the ECS Liva series myself.

The Cell is actually a really amazing processor in a lot of ways. It's really more of a SMP system with a ring-topology interconnect than a traditional SMT processor. You have to specifically build your design around it, but if you do so it's really fast. It's actually only recently that general-purpose x86 has caught up enough that it's feasible to emulate it. It would have been a very desirable piece of hardware for HPC, if you had stuff tailored to that architecture.

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paulmd10y ago

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