More than a toy, PlayStation 3 does Linux (InfoWorld)

Posted Nov 25, 2006 2:52 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

They should be about the same level of performance. I beleive the same CPUs being used in the IBM blades are used in the PS3 except that the PS3 has one of the SPU cores disabled. I could be wrong though.

The PS3 should be a boon for low-end clustering. Stuff to do with rendering movies or special effects or transcoding and stuff like that.

Depending on the sort of work you need to accomplish you can use a half a dozen PS3 from Gamestop or whatever that would do more work then a entire cluster of many dozens Intel P4 or Opteron machines.

The type of workloads are going to be limited, unfortunately, buy the amount of RAM aviable... Which I think effectively is 512megs (the CPU can directly access the VRAM I beleive, but probably not without extra work.).

Right now it's not to price wonderfull, but once you can get a PS3 for around 300 bucks or so then it should be nice for any graphic designer or 3d renderer or somebody that needs to transcode HD content to have a couple of those hid under the desk running Linux.

Posted Nov 25, 2006 15:18 UTC (Sat) by shimpei (guest, #11634) [Link]

Well, the paper does show that 8 SPEs can turn in 15-20x performance of a single-core Opteron, which translates to 12-15x performance for the 6 user-accessible SPEs on a PS3. The problem is, his Opteron code does not use SSE! If SSE is correctly utilized on the Opteron, who knows what the gap will be?

Mind you, I do own a PS3 and I'd love to see its potential proven, but I do not think this article was terribly useful as a x86-vs-Cell benchmark.