More than a toy, PlayStation 3 does Linux (InfoWorld) [LWN.net]

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

Posted Nov 25, 2006 2:52 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: More than a toy, PlayStation 3 does Linux (InfoWorld) by augustm
Parent article: More than a toy, PlayStation 3 does Linux (InfoWorld)

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.

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