Hacker News Reader

folding@home was used in the “console wars” to justify one’s choice of the PS3 over the Xbox 360.

Was the cell processor in the PS3 really that efficient for this purpose?

It was a fairly unique architecture that had some pros and cons. In reality what made it a winner was the steep subsidy by Sony (units were sold at a loss, making the assumption you would buy a few games) and the availability (later removed) of an official Linux distribution.

very few cared about linux. it was mostly hd-dvd (later dvd) vs blu-ray.

It was basically an all-purpose vector computing monster focused on SIMD. You could use it for physics simulations, animations, tesselation, etc. Basically everything you'd use a compute shader for nowadays.

That's why emulators need AVX512 support to match the PS3. It was incredibly powerful.

Obviously, in that era's single-threaded world no engine could make use of that functionality and few knew how to program for it. It was ahead of its time, by quite a while.

Remember around that time when the industry said that OpenCL would allow write-once run-everywhere compute code for a booming industry of diverse and competitive compute devices? I fell for that scam for a couple of years, before very fortunately getting a different job for long enough to watch the collapse from a safe distance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com