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Playstation 3 CPU Almost Finished?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the more-polys-means-more-grand-theft-auto dept.

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."

6 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Linux in mind? by slutdot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cell's designers are engineering the chip to work with a wide range of operating systems, including Linux.

    I don't see how that sentence translates to the statement by the submitter that the chip is designed with Linux in mind. Besides, shouldn't the OS adapt to the chip, not the reverse?

  2. export controls? by Jucius+Maximus · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Does this mean that Japan will add export controls to this like they did with the PS2?

    TheJapanese government realised that the computers in the PS2s were very powerful for the time and could be networked to create a crude missile guidance system.

  3. Slashdot in mind by ucblockhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Reportedly, this chip is being engineered with Linux in mind."
    Translation: the marketing guys mention Linux to get slashdot coverage.
    --
    The cake is a pie
  4. A terraflop? by wilburdg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The terraflop statistic is a little hard for me to swallow.

    The NERSC IBM SP RS/600 (the fifth most powerful computer in the world, according to top500.org) located in Berkeley consists of 2,944 processors. The processors are distributed among 184 compute nodes with 16 processors per node. Each node has a common pool of between 16 and 64 GBytes of memory.

    This machine is a 3 terraflop system. Although, I guess three PS3's could do the same...

  5. Great ... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article:
    "It's like a beehive -- cell components can also be ganged together," he said.

    Just when I thought programming the PS3 couldn't be any *worse* the then PS2 (lots of fun debugging the EE, VU0, VU1, GS, SPU, IOP all running simulatenously on the PS2 :), along comes 'linked' cpus. Sure parallelization rocks for performance, but it's a head ache for game design & implementation. This is one thing the X-Box got right - port your PC game over in days, not months. Ok, enuf k'vitching.

    How long do we have to wait for Gran Turismo to show-case the PS3 ? ;-)

  6. Moore's Law is not a law by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Moore's law is NOT a law, at best it's an observation that has so far been consistent.

    The cell is a highly parallel chip, it is outside the bounds of Moore's "law" because it doesn't follow the same design methodology. If I designed an FPGA today that had 1000 FPU's, and a simple CPU to control them, I could easily best a P4 in FLOPS. Trivial. Sony has done/will do in hardware what I have suggested, and given that they've been working on it for a couple of years, I think there may be more than just a couple of extra FPU's.

    All it takes is a little thought....

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!