Slashdot Mirror
Playstation 2 Outperforms Everything?
Emperor Palpatine writes "This article in Wired talks about the soon to be released Playstation 2 from Sony. Some pretty impressive talk. If they work it out so we can hook these up to a 10baseT, I may have to give it a try. "
I bet what they mean is that it will run on a linux based OS, but the complier and a visual programming tools will be proprietary. Also the hardware is going to be proprietary, so while the OS that they build for this special hardware can't legally be proprietary, it won't do you much good if you don't have the hardware which will likly be kept under lock and key from non developers
If people take the time to actually look up the technical details (see Microprocessor Report April 19, v15 i5) they'll probably get a more realistic idea of the capabilities instead of third-hand info from marketing flacks (not that I've got anything against salesdroids but slashdot is suppose to be targetted at a technical audience).
You can think (very broadly speaking) of the EmotionEngine as a R5K (like in SGI O2) coupled with 2 vector and 1 image unit. I wish people luck in developing partly asynchronous parallel/threaded algorithms that can get anywhere near the "peak" 6.2 Gflops. Also the I/O processor (ie the old Sony chip) only has space for 1 PCMCIA card on a 32 bit I/O bus. The other major constraint is total memory of 32 MBytes with no hard disk for swap space unless some bright spark can do some magic with an IEEE-1394 peripheral. As one wag noted, its easy to create a fast chip when you don't need to worry about memory hierarchies. At least it will have a lot of graphic functions built in (fog, sprites, particles, etc) so you can dazzle people with gee-whiz effects.
A go-kart is still a go-kart even if powered by a formula 1 engine. It will be a very useful and amusing console toy but don't expect it fufill your fantasties of having a supercomputer in your bedroom.
LL