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Cell is availiable, can be developed futher.

We could play with PS3 and one day develop real innovative machine
using main CPU all those programmable units. As far as I understand,
its NOT just Altivec, one unit could do MUI, other Reggae and so on (or game AI, rendering, visual effects, screen dragging ...) cooperate with nVIDIA gfx or in some other system some RadeonHD.

Needed drivers can be ported from Yellow Dog Linux.

Even if its experimental MOS 4 Cell special edition with limited
number of apps, GIMP, Blender and few Linux + some best AmigaOS 3/MorphOS apps
could really demo a nice and multimedia usable HW/SW combo.

As far as I understand Cell is smaller then G5 and some new board can be developed around it, as well as CPU itself is basis of supercomputer in chain, and alone as single Cell can be developed and scaled further. G5 and PA6T have reached its maximum and I am not that much impressed (yet) by X5000 CPU until proven wrong.

Quick Google shown:

http://www.psu.com/forums/showthread.php/18448-New-IBM-CELL-benchmark-may-2006-vs-G5

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http://www.yellowdog-board.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6537

YDL is yet not well optimized, and Cell optimized MOS SE with some apps could be a real Cell showoff

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Maybe its even possible to do Cell PCI or PCI-E card for Pegs and SAM460x Even Efika

Cell alone can do much much more then most of CPUs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Cell#Possible_applications

[ Edited by vox 12.01.2014 - 17:53 ]

Cell might be neat in one way or theother, but in the field of personal computing it is just as much a dead end as PPC.

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More so, they are still planning new additions to various PPC lines, the Cell is toast.

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It's by far even more dead than PPC for desktop PC's. It was never meant to be a desktop CPU even back when it was new, it has poor performance by todays standards, and hasn't even the cell concept for parallel computing been made redundant and obsoleted by CUDA/OpenCL years ago already, and even more so on modern GPU's? Nobody is making new Cell HW, especially not desktop motherboards, and IBM even ditched the Cell development a few years ago. So I'd say it's even "deader than dead"!

> Cell [...] can be developed futher. [...] single Cell can be developed and scaled further.

By whom?

> We could one day develop real innovative machine using main CPU all those
> programmable units.

Who is "we"?

> one unit could do MUI

I believe GUI classes are too intertwined with the actual program logic to allow for execution by something like Cell SPEs.

> Needed drivers can be ported from Yellow Dog Linux.

The use of the SPEs from OtherOS is openly documented.

> some new board can be developed around it

Of course that would be possible, but who should do it and why?

> YDL is yet not well optimized

And it won't be optimized for Cell any better as Fixstars gave up on the Cell years ago. The last YDL version supporting Cell was 6.2 in 2009. Starting with 6.2.1 in 2010, YDL went x86+CUDA, so no PPC support at all. With 7.0 in 2012, YDL has switched back to PPC, but this time POWER7-only, no Cell nor any other PPC.

> Maybe its even possible to do Cell PCI or PCI-E card

There're already Cell PCIe cards. As for Cell PCI cards, who should make them?

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Hey mr moderator, you wanted to share some wisdom?

Cell is dead end, XDR is bad, BlueRay is awful?

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It sure is. Especially so for desktop PC's.

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I'm sure it had its points, however I only see DDR3/GDDR5 today (even the new Mac Pro, which is a monster, spec wise), perhaps for a reason?

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I suppose it's good for what it was meant to be, a next-gen dvd, but optical disks per se has become something of the past, or at least it's heading in that direction very rapidly. If I hadn't already been owning a DVDR unit that could be re-used from my old PC, I wouldn't have put one into the tower of the new PC I built. I hardly ever use it, and a portable one would have done just fine for those rare occasions, and it could be kept in a drawer the rest of the time. The only reason I ever used the bluray in my PS3 was because most game came in this way only. But they are slow, have fixed limits, gets damaged easily, you have to get your ass up from the sofa to change them, they cost money, they create pollution when being produced, and adds to the huge waste mountains when you discard them. Frankly, I don't se a lot of positive sides with bluray.

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They said the same about cd's and dvd's, both selling today and will in the future, as will bluray.

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Yeah, but noone uses them for computer purpose anymore. Whatever-drives often are an addon these days. I personally did not *burn* a media for quite some time, so I did not even notice my drive was broken for probably several years.

They may still sell disc based media these days, but the use of home made discs is quite rare. It is easier to store the stuff on local drives and use them on all systems instead.

Speaking about the topic. It has been said porting to a console won´t be happen. Also the PS3 is a quite bad target these days. The WiiU is more powerful, has the right 3 core cpu, 2GB of memory and other cool features like build in display, nfc, camera, mic, but it still will not happen, as it makes simply no sense.

Even porting to the X1000 would make more sense than porting to a game console.

Geit

@Geit
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Ok. How do you / did you install all the versions of MorphOS? I have always had to burn the damn disc.

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I copied the boot.img from the mac_ppc32 folder to boot: then rebooted. Then I mounted the ISO and ran Tools/IWizard but Jaca told me this method is very bad and not supported.

The other way is to make a 512MB FAT16 partition on a USB stick and copy the boot.img from the ISO along with the ISO image itself and boot it from open firmware.

http://www.meta-morphos.org/faq.php?id_cat=11&myfaq=yes&categories=Mac+mini#32

[ Edited by Intuition 13.01.2014 - 18:02 ]

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MorphOS supports booting from ISO file for quite some time.

Geit.

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How? No such thing is mentioned in installation guide.

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It is explained here for example. On Macs it basically works the same.

Geit

[ Edited by geit 13.01.2014 - 19:52 ]

> How? No such thing is mentioned in installation guide.

It has been introduced with MorphOS 2.5:

"BootImage boot parameter (usage bi="devicename:morphos.iso")"
http://www.morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.5

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Did you ever hear about anecdotal evidence ? :)

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Tsts didn't get the last newspeak-memo ?

It's only anecdotal when it's going against your point of view!

Otherwise it's called "life experience".

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Either you have been living under a rock or under a bridge...

> I see it as grat multi purpose thing

As it was explained numerous times in this thread alone, the Cell is not exactly what most would call a multi-purpose CPU. Sure, it can do everything in some way or another, but for many desktop computing purposes it just doesn't cut it.

> Maybe IBM still use or develop it

If there's any truth in what IBM said in public, they don't.

> unlike PWREfficient that was killed as baby.

By Apple, not by IBM.

> much can be stored in way faster GPU memory

256 MiB VRAM isn't so much when to be used as system RAM. Even using all except 64 MiB VRAM as system RAM would give only 448 MiB. Besides, VRAM may be faster than system RAM, but only when accessed by the GPU. CPU access to VRAM is surely slower than to system RAM.

> YDL is reported to be poor just because its ported but not optimized.

You can optimize a desktop OS only so much for Cell. Optimization in Cell-context would primarily refer to the SPEs, and it has already been explained that they are not really suited for desktop computing purposes.

> Soon will come BR Recorders and combo drives ...

Blu-ray combo drives have been listed since at least 2007, external Blu-ray recorders since at least 2008 and internal ones since at least 2009:

http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/eu/?cat=dvdrom&xf=749_Blu-ray&sort=p#xf_top
http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/eu/?cat=dvdramext&xf=578_Blu-ray&sort=p#xf_top
http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/eu/?cat=dvdram&xf=578_Blu-ray&sort=p#xf_top

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... in Serbia.

Anyway, BR is standard, at least for high HDI countries.

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If you carry media (games/movies) from stores home it is standard.

Why whould anyone burn discs, beside making a backup of his computer harddrive? And speaking backup, I won´t even trust these media more than a burned DVD or CD, so I prefer storage on NAS.

In 2014 there are so many cheaper and easier to use ways, than using crappy selfmade discs with a limited lifetime.

Geit





[ Edited by geit 16.01.2014 - 14:21 ]

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I have Amiga backups on CD from 90s and they are 100% readable, unlike
storage media that dies in few years. Your choice.

However, Double Layer Blue Ray is greatest laser disc so far.

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Technology of writing the data and the quality of discs has risen to a top notch level since many years. That said I have still perfectly working cd's written about 15 years ago.. wouldn't be surprised if they outlive me. Having burned thousands of cd's and dvd's in my life I would bet only a fraction is not working if tested today.

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Bluray support is a completely different issue. Bluray support should be added "at some point", regardless of whether or not the development team would be too crazy, and risk getting sued by Sony by doing "proper" PS3 port, or doing crappy useless "OtherOS" version that no-one can run anymore. Both would be without 3D acceleration anyway.

Bluray support should be on the todo list, but with REALLY low priority.

...but of course MUCH higher priority than "Waste time doing useless PS3 port"

By the way, is it possible to have polls on morphzone? Would be nice to have some poll like:
Should MorphOS team do "2D-only" port of MorphOS for PS3?

Yes, OtherOS support is fine.
Yes, but needs to work on newer firmware by using latest hacks (and risk getting sued by Sony)
No, because there are already better platforms, such as Efika, that can run MorphOS better than PS3 ever would.
No, because development time shuld be better spent on supporting sensible targets (more PPC macs)
No, because developemt time should be spent on new OS features instead.

There's certain VERY vocal minority that claims it would make sense, would be nice to know if it would be "bigger-than-1".

Sometimes I wonder if he's an undercover OS4 user trying to damage MorphOS by trying to make the development team waste time on worthless work instead of more important things... Just kidding