Playstation 3 has the Cell supporting 256MB of XDR and 256MB of graphics memory (which Linux maps as swap space).

With innovations like the compressed cache/swap modules (http://code.google.com/p/compcache) you could run a reasonable system in 256MB (let's assume you didn't have as capable a graphics processor as nVidia's). It already has more than the Efika :)

Most of the reason they use so "little" XDR is because XDR costs an absolute fortune, compared to GDDR3 (as used on the nVidia) or DDR3 memory.

IBM actually warned people off Cell development within Power.org since they had other plans for the development. They probably have that all worked out now, and would be happy for it to go to other places.

The basic problem then, as always, is that the Cell is a very powerful chip and therefore NOT the nicest on power consumption - or fan noise. That could be solved by reducing the clock speed. This would also bring the price down somewhat.

It would probably be a fairly reasonable idea to make a system based on Cell, using a chip sorted for less than 8 SPEs (maybe 6, this gives a system which has exactly the number of SPEs as any PS3 game is allowed to use). Any apps designed to work with Toshiba SpursEngine would be optimized for performance on only 4 SPEs - so maybe 4 is enough. Either way this would also bring the price down.

It would also be reasonable to keep the 256MB of XDR RAM and supplement it some other way. They sell and people DIY their own PS3 clusters where 256MB seems to be more than enough RAM. Again.. price stays low.

What might bite you is selling a "desktop" system which met the specs of the Playstation 3 (albeit without the nVidia graphics or Blu-Ray drive..). I doubt Sony would be too pleased to lose their DIY cluster market.. the PS3 being a "supercomputer" is one of their marketing points. Without the Blu-Ray drive and the graphics controller and all the console shenanigans it might even be the same price as a PS3..

What might also bite you is the system controllers available which allow attaching PC-standard peripherals (PCI Express etc. for graphics). You're also probably not going to get the PowerXCell 8i processor at an affordable price, so the original Cell is what you're looking at. All in all though, great idea, we'd love to do something with it/about it..



[ Edited by Neko on 2009/1/29 2:04 ]