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PS3 Linux Now Installable
Quinton writes "Around midnight Pacific time on the 17th, Sony updated their Open Platform website needed to install PPC Linux on the PS3. The FTP Site contains the CELL Linux ADDON CD image, which has the bootloader (kboot/otheros.bld) and instructions needed to install Fedora Core 5, PPC. A full install from DVD takes about two hours. Most all hardware is supported except for graphics accelerator support (framebuffer only, up to 1920x1200)."
This and the cell processor were the major reasons why I was looking forward to the PS3. Blu-ray and HD-dvd still have to fight it out and it doesn't look like it's going to end quickly
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I hate Sony but be fair ... you get the Cell to play with. 6 SIMD cores at 3.2GHz plus a dual-threaded PPC. Should make any geek's day.
... can anyone confirm?
That is, I assume they haven't locked off the SPUs too
>Why do people like the cell processor?
It's not about the games. It's more important than that: The Cell points in the direction in which we can expect all computing to move. The Cell has a lot of hype which should be taken with your-daily-recommended-value-of-sodium-chloride, but I think it's true that it represents a legitimate effort by a company to put R&D into a new architecture designed around multiple cores. That matters.
Up front: A gaming machine might be the wrong application for the Cell. A lot of the buzz surrounding the Cell actually has to do with using the processors for scientific computation: The supercomputing market. I'm sure IBM et al didn't design the Cell with that in mind, since it's only a 32-bit chip (and serious scientific computation tends to require more precision than that), but I've heard rumors of a new 64-bit Cell (if IBM didn't scrap that project when they gutted their PowerPC/microprocessor teams of late).
But the Cell represents an important direction in processor design because, frankly, it looks like we can't make the chips much faster: We're already switching logic at microwave frequencies! It used to be that we could keep making transistors smaller and smaller and they'd get faster and faster -- but now, scaling is bottoming out: oxide thicknesses are 4 atoms! Since we can't push the transistors much more (I'm not counting on finFETs to save the day), we need to start paying attention to the architecture. I'm glad that someone is doing something a little innovative.
And you know: Maybe it's ok for games too. It was always my fantasy to do realtime raytracing. How about radiosity or photon mapping at interactive framerates? Those algorithms parallelize pretty well! ;-)