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Comment by Flammy | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember when PlayStation 3 could be used to install whatever OS you wanted without any jailbreaking? sigh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

It's the fault of their own business model which cuts cost on consoles (they have to compete against the other ones) only jack the price up later on games and make money there.

On the bright side, the Air Force made a really nice PS3 cluster.

http://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercompute...

Interesting! I found a paper by the lead / architect:

Integration and Development of the 500 TFLOPS Heterogeneous Cluster (Condor) [0]

Another release article that includes more information: http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-the-dods-playstation-power...

[0] http://ieee-hpec.org/2012/index_htm_files/Barnell.pdf

It's reasonable to suppose that the ps3 was an edge case. Current gen consoles didn't cost more per unit to manufacture than they sell for nor if we continue to see x86 machines will the next generations

IIRC, it came to be because Sony and IBM tried to make Cell the next big thing in supercomputing. But the concept proved to be a massive hassle to program.

Sony's main motivation in providing OtherOS functionality was, as always, money. By being able to run alternative OSes PS3 was classified as a computer and not a console for tax purposes, and Sony had to pay less tax because of that. I'm not sure what the actual numbers are tho, so someone else feel free to chime in.

One funny side effect of this was that dev kits for the PS3 were rack mounted 1U (?) units. As a game developer this was ridiculous because we each had one of these on our desks, usually with a tv sitting directly on top of it. Thankfully this was changed to something reasonable on PS4. The PS4 dev kits are pretty cool looking IMO.

I remember articles about the massive racks of PS3s in Linux clusters for people who wanted to use Cell for large parallel computing.

Did Sony/IBM every actually release viable/affordable Cell hardware outside of the PS3, or is Cell pretty much dead now?

Cell is dead. There were a few similar machines -- Intel IXP comes to mind. They were universally difficult to program and did not provide a significant performance advantage once multicore x86 became cheap.

ARM chips took the many-independent-cores end of the market, GPUs took the wide-SIMD end, and may history show that the Cell approach was a failure.

The OS install was sandboxed iirc, you couldn't use the graphics subsystem or something.

Right, having a sandbox and losing one SPE was not a big deal. Having no access to the GPU at all was.

Yeah it was always pretty nerfed. Cool that you could do it but it performed as well as a potato really.

I really hate my PS4 and PSN and want to run Linux or FreeBSD on it. I'm not much of a gamer, but I paid about $100 for a couple games I planned to play eventually. Then I got locked out of PSN and really can't be bothered to call Sony about it.

So now I have this awesome machine that should be running something actually interesting. I could care less about pirating games.

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