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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be in response to the announcements of PS3 hypervisor exploits that rely on the use of OtherOS (specifically, Linux), since in the past Sony has insisted that they had no plans to ever deprecate Linux support, let alone force it in this manner:

http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2009-August/00...

Allowing people to opt out of the firmware update isn't as nice as it sounds, since you can't have a damaged PS3 serviced without getting it updated to the latest firmware. A few PS3 devs I follow on twitter have already discussed buying extra 'fat' PS3s to use as replacements in case their current ones die.

Kind of a short-sighted decision, since a lot of people who do development on PS3 software use this feature - getting a real devkit for use at home isn't particularly easy, and PS3 linux lets you do a lot of Cell hacking on inexpensive hardware.

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> PS3 linux lets you do a lot of Cell hacking on inexpensive hardware.

This benefits mostly IBM, who sells Cell-based blade servers. Sony sells PS3 consoles at a loss. Any use that does not include buying a couple games means a bad quarterly report.

Are they still selling them at a loss?

That's how it starts out, before serious cost reduction.

Also, hasn't IBM capped the Cell line?

Yes, still at a loss from the what I last read over at gamasutra and game developer. SONY anticipated turning a profit with the release of the PS3 slim but that apparently did not pan out.

The Slim has no Linux capability and allowing Linux on older PS3's holds no benefit for Sony. It made a little sense in the beginning, teaching some Cell skills to developers who could get interested into developing for the machine, but none now (or they would allow it on the slim). What makes sense is the idea Sony fears exploits coming from the Linux side could compromise the signing keys and allow bootleg/homebrew software to run on the consoles.

> Also, hasn't IBM capped the Cell line?

Nope. At least two blades on the lineup. Don't know for how long - GPUs should pack more punch per watt and per dollar.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/i...

Thank you!

Further research indicated that IBM canceled one Cell processor but by no means all of them; I assume what I read back in November confounded the two.

The Cell, as a HPC core, makes little sense. You can get more mileage out of a generic GPU these days, it seems. And with the coming arrival of x86s with on-chip GPUs, I guess it will be very hard to sell a Cell blade at those costs. It simply doesn't have the horsepower.

Sony may end-up being the only customer using it. And that may bring an early arrival to the PS4.

What does one have to do to get a dev kit actually?

Pitch your game concept to Sony; if they approve it then you'll be allowed to buy a ~$10K devkit. (Or if you're a wildly successful indie game developer, they'll give you a devkit for free.)

Or you can use a modchip (not so easy with the PS3 though). At the last studio I worked at, rather than purchasing new dev kits, I/we figured that using modded PS2's for the QA team was a lot more cost effective. My contact at SONY did not think it was such a bad idea either :)

Is each Devkit ~10K, or is that for a site license? It seems that QA costs would be astronomical if they were 10K per system.

That's for each one. Apparently I'm a little behind the times, because they dropped to $2K recently: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/24/sony-introduces-a-new-ps3... IIRC they were originally ~20K and the military-industrial complex kept trying to buy them but Sony refused because they didn't even have enough for the real game developers.

I've read that many console games are developed simultaneously on PC and console so that the developers who don't have a devkit can run the game.

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