“It all began when a young man named George Hotz began to work on the PlayStation 3, trying to gain access to the machine in a way that made Sony uncomfortable. In response, Sony removed the OtherOS functionality of the PlayStation 3 in a mandatory update, and the hacking community was not happy with this decision, resulting in a sort of cold war. PS3 hackers have once again gained the upper hand: Linux has been returned to the PlayStation 3.”
I used to think those console hacks were great but when we come down to it, it’s really just hacking for the sake of hacking. I mean, who will jump through all the hoops just to run linux on a PS3 as their everyday box?
With the variety that today’s PCs offer in performance and form factor, it’s become so easy to find something that fits one’s needs. It’s also easier to get drivers for such hardware and get on with your productive day.
I guess putting linux on the PS3 is like climbing a high mountain. You put a lot of effort into it and you’re really happy once you’re on top but then all you can do is sit for a minute, take a picture and come back down.
As it was already written:
And see what US Air Force do, for example:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercompute…
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/345642/Air_Force_Taps_PlaySt…
http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=us%20air%20force%20…
Not to mention an HDMI port, a GPU you can actually play modern games on, and a form factor that fits nicely in an entertainment center.
Note: This is not a rhetorical question. I would love to get a PS3, but I don’t want to jump through hoops to fully unlock it. But if I could get a real HTPC with comparable specs for about the same price, I would.
Edited 2011-05-07 00:20 UTC
Nowadays the cell is easily beaten by a modest GPU using CUDA, STREAM or OpenCL.
If you read the given links, you’ll see what the US Air Force has done.
So we have to choose between those two possibilities:
– The US Air Force is not well informed.
– An internet commenter is not well informed.
That is actually a false dichotomy, and both of the elements in the dichotomy are fallacies themselves.
A fallacy inside of a fallacy, inception!
That post is so full of mistakes that is beyond all recovery.
Basically what was previously said is that: US Air Force calculated the options and saw that the “Nowadays the cell is easily beaten by a modest GPU using CUDA, STREAM or OpenCL” was not true.
Bam! Another fallacy, yer on a roll…
If there were so many mistakes it would have been very easy to start.
IBM and other 3rd party vendors have provided plenty of BLADE PCI-E and Blade add ons which allow CELL programmability much easier (and legally). Also if cost was a concern for the US Air force, newer GPUs do provide much higher computational density at similar price points.
So yeah, it could very well be that the US Air Force does not know what they are talking about, and that the previous poster was in fact, correct. For example.
they calculated those options years ago. there would be a different outcome today. Or do you think nothing has changed in the intervening years?
Or… such purchasing decisions were made years ago when the Playstation still had the lead.
Anyway, the Playstation Cell processor achieves 230 GFLOPS single precision. An entry-level nVidia GPU such as the Geforce GT 440 (~80 Euros) achieves 342 GFLOPS single precision. More expensive cards and Tesla stream do above 1 TFlop. Also, modern GPUs have a lot more memory available, which is nice, because it allows for larger working sets and copying data from main memory to the GPU memory is expensive..
Also take into account that generally everyone agrees that CUDA is much more fun to program than for Cell, and that modern off-the-shelf Intel CPUs have 2-4 cores (compared to PS3’s single core PowerPC CPU), x86 hardware is suddenly far more interesting these days than the Playstation 3.
But after all, we are comparing 2006 hardware to 2011 hardware.
Edited 2011-05-07 15:42 UTC
If somebody reads the given links, he’ll see that, for example, those news about the new supercomputer are from November and December of the last year.
Edited 2011-05-07 16:24 UTC
Yes, they’d also discover that the project was started in 2006. That is when the decision was made, not 2011.
Its like when Apple switched to intel, everyone brought up the Virginia state super computer as evidence that PPC was faster and cheaper. Technology… changes quickly. You can’t base a decision today on a four year old assessment.
Or maybe it’s not like this. Maybe the quoted supercomputer is just better built this way. Maybe the US Air Force builds supercomputers better than some people that have never built one. 😕
Appeal to authority, another fallacy.
Holy crap!
Yes, obviously its possible that ps3 is still the best choice for their use case. My point is that the stated article gave no evidence to that fact and did not support your thesis.
Heck for my use case, its possible a commodore 64 is the best choice. I could link to a story from 1984 to that talks about how great it is, but that’s not supporting my theory that its my best choice. And you really don’t know what my use case is, any more than you know the US Air Forces.
CUDA is a specialized vector processor which could be unsuitable for some tasks which the PS3 could excel at, even if it has a lower theoretical G-Flops throughput.
For instance, the PS3 can run existing code with a recompile. CUDA requires developers to reimplement code around new APIs.
CUDA is great for SIMD computation models, but does poorly with algorithms where parallel branches diverge.
I haven’t studied either architecture much, but it makes sense to avoid sweeping generalizations.
Actually, no.
The PS3’s main CPU is a simple in-order PowerPC core. It’s actually quite slow compared to standard PC parts.
If you want to get any kind of computing power out of the PS3, you need to use the SPEs. These are basically vector coprocessors (you have 6 of them on the PS3), which have a completely different programming model than a normal CPU. You can’t really just re-compile for the SPEs and expect it to work. Even if you could, it’d be much slower than running on the main CPU. Code has to be specially written for the SPEs, taking their unusual architecture into account.
They aren’t quite like GPUs, but they aren’t much like CPUs either.
ba1l,
“Actually, no.
The PS3’s main CPU is a simple in-order PowerPC core. It’s actually quite slow compared to standard PC parts.”
We are both right. You *can* re-compile and use existing code on the PS3’s generic processors and you will get speedup for running multicore. The PS3 also has special vector processors which, as you say, may be difficult to access through generic code.
“You can’t really just re-compile for the SPEs and expect it to work.”
I suppose it depends on the compiler. Intel’s compiler does a fantastic job converting generic code into SSE vector operations (aka running 2+ iterations of a loop in parallel using SIMD).
Although in this case, the SSE opcodes are designed to interoperate in sync with the rest of the CPU. I’d guess that the cell’s vector processors are designed to run asynchronously like CUDA and the overhead of dispatching vector instructions is high.
I thought the PS3 supported two PPE threads but I can’t find that info now. Maybe that is wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_%28microprocessor%29
Both SPEs and PPEs are programmed in C/C++.
I’m not sure what limitations, if any, there are for running C code on the SPEs. I see no reason they cannot be used to execute non-SIMD aware code.
It also seems plausible in theory that the compiler could convert some serial code to SIMD like ICC does with SSE.
The SPEs are isolated from one another and from the PPE, have no shared memory, no operating system, the entire working set has to fit in 256KB, and you must do communication with the PPE using mailboxes and DMA.
You might be able to run some plain C code on the SPE, if it can fit onto the SPEs, and doesn’t need the operating system. It’s unlikely to even be as fast as running it on the PPE, and the PPE can be beaten by, say, a first generation Core 2. It’d just be wasting most of the SPE’s potential.
You’d have to rewrite for the SPEs, using explicit vectorization. It’s the only way to make good use of the SPEs.
You can actually use OpenCL on the Cell, which generates code to run on the SPEs. No idea if that’s better – my PS3 can’t run Linux anymore, so I can’t try it out. OpenCL is certainly easier to use, but has a different programming model (MIMD, rather than SIMD).
Stupid double post. (why is there no delete here?)
Edited 2011-05-08 11:57 UTC
The military does not move at the speed of light. It is at the best interest of a company to sell any branch of the military a stock of systems and shoehorn them into support contracts. I have under good authority that the Army Corps of Engineers still has DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha systems clustered running VMS.
Edited 2011-05-09 17:46 UTC
And then you can download homebrew games, emulators, etc. and actually *use* the hardware you bought for lots of other things that Sony didn’t let you do to begin with.
My mod’d original XBOX can do all sorts of neat-o things, including play a DVD, watch countless videos and listen to my entire music collection off the NAS in my office. It also happens to emulate just about any retro console I would want it to.
Edit: Oh, and the console was free, modchip was < $50
Edited 2011-05-07 00:12 UTC
I think security research is important, like when they attacked the MD5-hash of a SSL/TLS Certificate Authority Root Certificate and created a rogue certificate:
http://lwn.net/Articles/314997/
And there you have it. Some folks simply enjoy the journey more than the destination, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. 🙂
If this was a new console that was hacked, then I might agree with you that it’s a largely pointless exercises that’s engaged for purely hobbiest (is that a word?) reasons.
However the PS3 did previously support Linux and Sony forcefully removed that feature post sale. So in reality all these hackers are do is returned advertised features to a devices that a purchased with it.
It really is a sad state of affairs when you have to hack a device just to retain functionality, let alone enhance it.
No, and the correct word you’re looking for is “hobbyist”, just so you know in the future
Thank you
OtherOS was not an advertised feature of PS3 Slim.
Edited 2011-05-07 21:39 UTC
Nope, but the side-effect of returning OtherOS to the PS3 Fat is that it also happens to work on the Slim – which people figured it would, and Sony just didn’t want to support it any more (they’re notorious for removing features in subsequent revisions of their consoles, unlike most others).
Really too bad too – since the slim uses less power, and would make all those PS3 clusters even more efficient.
Yes it was, not only was it written on my box, it was written in the users manual. I kept all of it as evidence.
Ventajou,
It may be useless to you, but so what? Instead of building a large server out of bulky consumer components, we can re-provision something which is compact and more suitable.
If people can benefit from homebrew software when devices aren’t locked down by the manufacturer, who are you to tell them it’s useless?
Hacks can extend the functionality, productivity, and lifetime of devices. Consider how much interest there is in custom firmwares for routers and nas devices.
Does anyone know which PS3 models have NAND flash? I’ve been looking on google, but I haven’t found anything.
http://www.ps3hax.net/showthread.php?p=197685#post197685
The ones with 256 MB are NAND machines