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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

PS3 allowed other OSes like Linux or BSD. It was eventually scrapped due to no market demand for it.

> It was eventually scrapped due to no market demand for it.

Rather the opposite. I think it ended up as part of several compute clusters because the console was sold for less than it cost to produce, something normally offset by game sales. So suddenly Sony had a large market that only cost it money.

You know we're all bullshitting here apparently but my guess is that happened relatively little. The PS3 was too exotic of hardware to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.

I'm sure internally it was pitched as a neat idea why don't we see what happens (god can you imagine the corporate politics in a decision like that?), but practically it allowed Sony get get special import status.

I'm sure eventually they realized they didn't care about that enough it outweigh allowing those filthy users to possibly do something interesting.

Sony throws a lot of stuff at the wall. There was a good chunk of hardware cut out of later PS3s, not to mention continued attempts and silent canceling of things like those move lightguns, etc.

I remember reading an article about the US military using a PS3 supercomputer cluster for something, but it was so long ago I don't remember where or if it was a puff piece or something actually significant.

It was the 33rd most powerful supercomputer at its time and, according to[0] AFRL director, it cost them 5~10% the cost of a system made with off-the-shelf computer parts.

[0]: https://www.wpafb.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/399987...

> The PS3 was too exotic of hardware

Wasn't more an issue that games didn't specifically optimize for cell processors? They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.

> to get useful compute out of it during the length of time that option was arounnd.

There were at least three largish cluster setups, the biggest being a super computer with almost 2000 PS3s. Of course you are right, that is barely a blip on their sales.

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

> They had to run on dozens of platforms and the Cell processor was the odd one out.

That’s what being exotic hardware means.

It would be the same issue for whatever supercomputer code you want to run. If you don't specifically target for the Cell SPEs, you're left with a single PPE that could barely keep up with the Pentium 4s and Athlon64s at the time.

My university had a few PS3 clusters. The CS department loved them because you could buy three of them for the price of a good server. The department even offered a crash course on programming for the PS3. I didn't take it, but from what I understand, it wasn't that difficult to program (for the department use cases).

The major use case for these was for number crunching (training neural nets, running physics simulations, etc). And these things were something crazy, like 100x faster than a similarly priced PC server. There were plenty of libraries out there for doing linear algebra.

A quick google search suggests that this was extraordinarily common in academia. I found materials from lots of different universities that were close to what I remember my peers talking about.

This was also a little bit before CUDA hit. So there really wasn't a mainstream offering for doing massively parallel, SIMD calculations.

Edit: I went to Wright State Uni and most of my CS professors did research associated with the Air Force, which as forgotpwd16 notes, had at the time a super computer made from PS3s. This might explain why the PS3 was so popular among our department.

Thanks for that reply, that's very cool. It seemed like a marketing gimmick, I'm surprised to see it was the real deal.

I never believed they're selling it at a loss, selling at a very low margin I can believe.

It's very common to sell game consoles at a loss. They make it back in game sales.

I said I don't believe, not I've never heard of that.

I think it's an urban legend fueled by marketing, I've never seen any hard proof of that, except some BOM calculations from independant analyse, but I don't think mass production work that way.

Those are basically the same thing, depending on how you bookkeep the fixed cost of development.

No, the real reason as I believe it, is because Sony wanted to eliminate a potential door to being able to unlock the console because this is something that was being very actively worked on by geohot and a few others.

No that feature was included to sidestep taxes in some markets (general purpose computers usable for research being lower tax category than game specific computers). They never intended it to be used by many consumers. The PS3 was cracked because the feature was removed.

AFAIK, they pulled it because geohot got an "exploit" running under linux (unlocked the GPU or something, can't remember now) and their reaction was it was too much risk that it could lead to piracy

This is the actual reason the "Other OS" support was pulled. The other speculation in here is pretty funny. It was also pretty limited for many purposes - you couldn't access the GPU at all reducing total system memory to 256mb IIRC.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/25/playstation_cracked_w...

https://tedium.co/2020/11/27/sony-linux-otheros-geohot-histo...

It's arguable giving hackers a platform to explore the innards of the PS3 was the biggest contribution Other OS made to the PS3, and I'm not surprised it scared Sony management. In the release notes for the PS3 firmware update that removes "Other OS", Sony also state it was for "security concerns":

https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-u...

"...will disable the “Install Other OS” feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update."

The "security concerns" were of course geohot/others using it to crack the PS3 DRM.

Pretty sure the actual reason was to prevent exploits that lead to piracy.

Pretty sure the actual reason was console margins and non-gaming buyers. At the time [1], it was believed that Sony lost hundreds of dollars per console. The business case for the losses was that the cost could be recouped with games. But people and organizations buying the PS3 for its computing capabilities, running OtherOS, were not buying enough games to recoup the losses.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/11/8239/

This, it was powering ML clusters irrc.

US Air Force built a PS3 cluster.

Hundreds of dollars sounds bigger than the average game library's licensing fee.

I’ve read the other replies but I remember well why it failed: only single precision floats.

You can’t run physics simulations on single precision. So the people who would have bought and tinkered and pushed it forwards were all turned off by it.

The military was allowed double precision; but there was no point making it a compute cluster otherwise.

I don’t know if it was a marketing or budget decision but basically all the early adopters who would have championed doing impressive things on there (I was so hyped at the time for the cell architecture) couldn’t do anything useful with it.

There's a lot of physics you can do in single precision. In fact, current gen climate models are mostly in single precision, and some of the next gen models are trying to do a lot of the work in half precision (float16).

I’ll give you it’ll be algo and scale dependent. I work with climate modellers and I think they’d get more bang for their buck with optimising for GPU architectures.

I recall I was very excited at the prospect of getting my hands on a ps3 for modelling, but all my work (1) at least required double precision and it left a long bad taste in my mouth when it wasn’t to be.

(1)chaotic plasmas

Should have done ML! ML loves single precision

i bought a ps3 and not a xbox to be able to install linux, and use it as a computer to see later that they disabled it in an update. jailbreaked it. will never buy again a sony product.

rewriting History much? That's not at all what happened.

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