Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1193 from 2003/2/24
From: Helsinki, Finland
Quote:
minator wrote:
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.
nvidia won't be supported (fully). That statement has been continuously given by the team. Or at least there are no current plans to support it, of course there are some SENSIBLE reasons (aka "Not PS3") to support it, such as some iBook & PowerBook models having it built-in.
Quote:
Don't expect G5 performance.
Yep. Better buy a G5 with supported gfx card instead, and expect (single core) G5 performance
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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!
Yes, I know Altivec is easy to program for (I got the official documentation books from Freescale) and SPE shouldn't be much different.
MorphOS has supported Altivec for a long time, and the majority of userbase has Altivec-enabled system. That means that every program out there supports Altivec by now, right?
What, no? Why?
No matter how "easy" it would be, it would
have to be done. It's always easier to just compile the code (mostly) as-it-is for MorphOS, and release.
Nowadays most code is coming from "outside" (open source linux projects), and there higher end(G4+) PowerPC has really been going out-of-fashion lately... So not many projects bother adding any support, and neither do people who port them to MorphOS.
Also, Altivec is good for very specific tasks, if the program doesn't do much of that, there's no point of adding support.
And now, if there was also SPE support in the OS, and very small minority of userbase would have capable systems (as most would want a better system, such as Efika), how much less point would there be to waste time optimizing?
