

Blundering Sony Nukes PS3 Supercomputing and At What Cost? - MojoKid
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Sony-Ban-Nukes-PS3-Supercomputers-Damages-Future-Game-Development/
Gamers, of course, are the ones who will pay for Sony's mistake long term. Don't expect the scientific/HPC community to come rushing as saviors when it comes time for Sony to babble about the PS4--and without the help of this august assemblage, maybe we'll get stuck with games featuring cutting-edge 1987 graphics fidelity. Leisure Suit Larry, here we come.
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tedunangst
"It would have required a minimum amount of effort to earmark a small run of
pre-Slim hardware (or a certain batch of PS3 Slims) for HPC researchers."

Even a small amount of effort is more than most companies are willing to
expend on a sales channel that loses money with every sale. Stupid Sony isn't
going to lose as much money as last year. Keep this up and they may make a
profit. What a blunder!

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ebiester
All sony had/has to do was license out the cell processor and the OtherOS
technology, or increase the price on the units and limit the sales channels.
Sony could have figured out a way to make money on this.

Of course, I'm surprised somebody else hasn't done the same thing by now.

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kostko
The article forgot to mention one important point. The option to install
another OS on PS3 only disappears if the firmware is updated to the latest
version. And to my knowledge, I see no reason why these computing farms should
update. They need no PSN access and updates bring no new benefits to the
installed OS. New PS3 slim models are already missing that option out of the
box.

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mbreese
This is true, but I believe the point isn't that pre-existing PS3 HPC clusters
will be hampered, it's that no new ones will be created.

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wmf
That hardly matters, since the PS3 is already obsolete for HPC. In 2007 it was
pretty interesting but today you should be using GPUs.

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FlorinAndrei
Aw, man, I'm so conflicted about that.

I made the financial effort to refurbish the "fat" PS3 when it died, even
though I'd already bought a Slim, just to keep that system around to learn
Cell programming. It's still running the old firmware and, in fact, boots
directly into Yellow Dog Linux by default.

Yet, I agree, it feels kind of pointless nowadays, with the GPUs becoming so
much better all the time. Just recently the GTX 260 broke the $200 floor at
newegg.com and I'll probably buy one pretty soon (maybe when they are around
$150) - and those things are pretty powerful. The real motivator is actually
to play Tomb Raider Underworld :-) but I'm pretty sure I'll at least try and
do some CUDA with it.

So, doing an open source project on the Cell doesn't seem so attractive
nowadays. Maybe just for bragging?

I've also heard rumors that there's a successor to the Cell in the works. I'm
not sure how it will compare with the GPUs though.

~~~
wmf
Putting aside what I know about this specific topic, a hypothetical Cell 2
would remain the same for five years and thus might be interesting when it
came out but would also be obsolete for most of its lifetime. There's just no
way for console chips that are updated every five years to compete with CPUs
and GPUs that are updated every year.

