Playstation 3 CPU Almost Finished?

dnxthx writes "According to this ZDNet article the design of the Playstation 3 chip is nearly complete. The PS3 chip will have near "supercomputer capabilities" --- including 1 TFLOP. Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."

Comments

Re:Late 2004?

[slyfox]

The article states that they have "taped-out" the design. However, when I visited IBM-Austin last December (I gave a presentation on my research) they were still in the high-level idea phase. There is no way they could have decided on the design and completed it so quickly. My guess is this is a "test chip", like the one they did for Power4. Power4's test chip tested some of the critical circuits and such, but it was not the final design.

That said, it seemed like they were considering some pretty wild ideas. However, I remember hearing about plans for the Playstation 2 chip a couple of years before it shipped; at the time it was hard to fathom, but when it arrived it wasn't as big a leap as I thought it was going to be. (Though still quite impressive.)

I expect the Playstation 3 will be just as impressive, but not earth-shattering. They key will be how easy it is to write programs that take advantage of the raw computational power.

Re:Linux in mind?

[intermodal]

Linux in mind. That means that the person/persons designing it are trying to make it easy to run linux on it. This does not make it linux-specific. If I buy a NIC with a variety of OSes listed on the box from WinXP down to MS-DOS, Win3.1, SCO Unix, and Linux, it is still designed with Linux in mind because compatibility was considered in its development and it means that it will work under linux (supposedly). The reason it was used in such a manner on this article heading (the /. one) is that most people here frankly couldn't care less about whether it'll run Windows or such. Though a teraflop PS3 as a BeBox...that'd be cool