By Alde (
November 28, 2006 at 1:19 am)
· Filed under Games & Gear
So imagine this:
You walk into a datacenter, oh say, 60 Hudson, and you walk towards your cage. You look over into someone elses cage, and you see rack upon rack of Sony Playstation 3’s. This boggles your mind; why would anyone want to use those cheezy gaming machines as servers…
Well, consider this:
The CPU: The Cell CPU has 8 SPEs (Think CPUs cores, akin to the Core2Duo or the Athlon X2). Though there are only 6 available in the PS2. This allows for consistent thread handling.
Registers: 128 bit registers. 128 of them. That’s a lot of data. If you need to do some high precision number crunching, having to store 128 bits once (instead of two stores on a 64 bit registers, or 4 on 32 bit registers), and a single retrieve, that’s a lot less time spent in register I/O. What if you don’t need all 128 bits? For high speed math (say, cryptography), you can bitslice your data so that a single store can retrieve a 64 bit number (or 40 for DES). 128 bit SSL fits just nicely. Once could even use this as a IPSEC or SSL Tunnel terminator. Also, all datapaths are 128 bits wide. No Stuffing of registers down the bus either.
Power & Price: So you have this computer capable of doing 25 GFlops, for a cool $600. Though it does draw a little much in the way of power (380 Watts), most high end servers draw more than this (Consider the “CoolThreads Sun T1000″, which purports to be a low power draw, pulls 563 Watts at max. So 380 is actually good for a high end server. Why pay for a fully enabled IBM Blade server (9 enabled cores per blade) when you can get a PS3 for much cheaper.
Video Processing: One of my friends used to work at Turner (at Cartoon Network in the accounting department), she took me on a tour of the facilities one evening, and having a background in Radio and TV, i was amazed at their editing rooms. Imagine a control panel and a couple of TVs, while all the SVHS decks were in a climate controlled centralized location. This would be easily replaced by a few PS3’s. Toshiba had a working reference design that was capable of displaying 48 HDTV Streams live at the same time on the same screen.
OS: Sony has released all the information (or will be releasing soon) to run Linux on the PS3 (I’d imagine BSD will soon follow). Using any PowerPC based build you’ll be able to load and compile a plethora of open source software to run on the PS3.
I just hope Sony won’t have a hissy when people start replacing servers with PS3’s at a loss for Sony.
By Alde (
November 23, 2006 at 11:14 pm)
· Filed under Games & Gear
The Thrifty Knitter has a pattern for Katamari Damacy earmuffs. If I knew that more than one person in New Jersey would get this reference, I’d get my wife to make me a set…
Q: Do you have plans to release a Playstation 6 in the future?
A: No, that’s just ridiculous. I’m not made of duct tape.
Sony Playstation, 3 of them. This reminds me of the guy who was selling Playstation 2 boxes… And in the description it was that it was the empty Playstation 2 box. Think he got $400 for the empty box.
Buy a PS3…Oops, you set the buy it now price at 99 cents… What a bargain!
By Alde (
November 18, 2006 at 6:13 pm)
· Filed under Games & Gear
My wife and I went out shopping today, mainly because of a 50% off sale at Linen’s and Things (Got some Riter Sport amongst other tastiness). We drove by the nearby Best Buy, and noticed that there were people with tents camping out, for what I thought was the PS3, but when we got to Target, we realized it wasn’t for the PS3, it was for the Wii . Holy crap. Did people not understand that it was Sony who was having the manufacturing problems, not Nintendo? And Tents? I looked at the 13 launch titles. Not one of them was worth wasting my time waiting for the game:
Ok, so about the only interesting one is Tony Hawk, but not enough. About the only really cool thing out for the PS3 so far is that it will run Linux. Wonder when someone will hack it for a larger Harddrive, add a USB TV-Tuner, and port MythTV to it?
amongst other tastiness). We drove by the nearby Best Buy, and noticed that there were people with tents camping out, for what I thought was the PS3, but when we got to Target, we realized it wasn’t for the PS3, it was for the Wii 
. Holy crap. Did people not understand that it was Sony who was having the manufacturing problems, not Nintendo? And Tents? I looked at the 13 launch titles. Not one of them was worth wasting my time waiting for the game: