• Order of the Butterfly
    Order of the Butterfly
    minator
    Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
    I used to support this idea but then Sony killed off the OtherOS option...

    However the PS3 has long since been completely hacked, so the Hypervisor is no longer a problem and there are no limitations to accessing all its hardware. It could be supported fully but it would be legally dubious to say the least.

    The PPE is limited by being in-order and having a slow cache. Performance is good for some apps but it's not so good on heavily branchy stuff. OTOH it's apparently very good at ray-tracing which is very branchy. Don't expect G5 performance.

    BTW the PPE core is the very same core that is used in the XBox360 Waternoose processor. The difference is that the XBox360 has 3 of them and they have a souped up version of AltiVec with 128 registers - not entirely unlike the SPEs...

    The "difficult to program (TM)" SPEs are really just souped up AltiVec units with their own memory. If you know about threading, double buffering and AltiVec, you can program an SPE. Most people who have actually programmed them did *not* say they were difficult to program - I spent a year working with people who wanted to sell Cell workstations so I know exactly what people said about it. I suspect the whole "difficult to program" is really just FUD from a certain large semiconductor company who had nothing to complete with it!

    As for the amount of memory in the PS3. It's probably due to price and especially power.
    Cell could access 32GB or something like that - but the XDR chips were relatively low capacity and 32GB would take something like 700 Watts!
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