ps3 + Tiger = <3

[Shmi]

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1221

oooh.. PS3 might support Tiger as an OS.. drool.

[Thunderstruck]

I don't know what Sony's trying to achieve with that kind of press release.

[Brother Munro]

Perhaps Sony want to get Aplle to design an OS for the PS3? But as the article said with Apple moving to Intel chips and dropping support for PPC Macs it seems unlikely that they will suddenly decide to support both. Though if PS3 games could be put through Rosetta... 

[lg_alucard]

It would more likely be the FreeBSD team developing support for the cell then apple yanking it and making it prettier and calling it OS X for the PS3

[stigmata]

Yay, a general-purpose OS running on a processor that's completely unsuited to general purpose processing. What fun.

Will the BSD origins of OS X limit its performance beyond two cores, though?

[xXdaveXx]

The Cell CPU has quite a bit of potential, but the way it is implemented on the PS3 certaintly would never allow it to run a full fledged operating system completley.

There are seven custom Cell CPUs on the Playstation 3, each running at an OF of 3.2GHz. For a Cell CPU, that is actually complete crap. But it's all good, consoles don't need powerful single CPUs anyway. It does help that there are 7, it allows for easier, faster, and more efficient multi threading (for example: running a 7 player game, playing sound and proccessing enemy AI at the same time).

Operating systems need one, or two, very powerful CPUs each to run the software they do. They could not take advantage of the multi cores seen in the Playstation 3, they would be limited to one crappy CPU per application, which would not run very well.

Hence, general public, I would call this a publicity stunt. Nothing to see here.

[rusty]

The Cell CPU has quite a bit of potential, but the way it is implemented on the PS3 certaintly would never allow it to run a full fledged operating system completley.

Well...given that IBM has a dual-Cell sever board I fail to see the logic in this.  Yes the Cell is suited for  games in that it can calculate masses of vector data in very little time, but don't discount it as a general purpose CPU.

There are seven custom Cell CPUs on the Playstation 3, each running at an OF of 3.2GHz. For a Cell CPU, that is actually complete crap.

First off, it's a single Cell which has seven SPE's running in parallel under the control of the Cell's main CPU.  I had an interesting chat with a coder who used to work with me who is lucky enough to have access to Cell docs (lucky bastard) about the DMA architecture and the local memory configuration of each SPE and it's all more flexible than I was first led to believe.

The same goes for general purpose applications.  Okay...maybe not so much for things like Word or Excel, but definitely Databases (querying a large database?), Image Processing (Photoshop ?) and video processing will benifit from parallel processing. 

So many people here saying that the Cell is unsuited to general purpose computing.  From what I remember, this is whay Sony and IBM wanted in the first place..a powerful processor for ALL your computing needs. 

I'm completely biased in this opinion, but I really would like to see a Cell workstation with a good OS.  Just think....you would have a workstation that is easily 5 times more powerful than anything else that is likely to appear on the market for the next five to six years; and that's only with a single Cell.

Mmmm....dual or even quad Cell goodness.  It might never happen, but I can dream

[stigmata]

Mmmm....dual or even quad Cell goodness.  It might never happen, but I can dream

Show me a program that will make good use of all four Cell processors, and I'll show you a pipe dream.

[rusty]

Mmmm....dual or even quad Cell goodness.  It might never happen, but I can dream

Show me a program that will make good use of all four Cell processors, and I'll show you a pipe dream.

well...yes...like I said; I can dream.  Given that my SHL generation code takes about a day to process a relatively small scene on the top-end Intel or AMD processor, I'm pretty sure I can find lots of things to do with a quad Cell board.

But then....my use is quite specialised, it would be insane to think that the average user will need or really want that sort of processing power.  Shit....I'd settle for a single Cell workstation to start off with, and I'm pretty sure you would too...just think of the shaders you could render with. 

[stigmata]

I'm pretty sure I can find lots of things to do with a quad Cell board.

A single piece of software with 32 concurrent threads? Good luck, especially since each and every SPE can only run software that is specifically written for it (instead of the PPE on each chip). I can imagine that this wouldn't be particularly harsh for something like 3D rendering, where you could spawn a larger number of threads to suit the size of the image, but the only software that would make full use of even one of these processors would be in-house and closed-source.

Literally 99.9% of users don't require two processing cores, let alone 8+, at any clockspeed.

[rusty]

A single piece of software with 32 concurrent threads? Good luck...

You're acting like parallel processing is some sort of black art.  Just because you understand very little or nothing at all about the skills involved, doesn't mean that it's impossible to do. 

especially since each and every SPE can only run software that is specifically written for it (instead of the PPE on each chip). I can imagine that this wouldn't be particularly harsh for something like 3D rendering, where you could spawn a larger number of threads to suit the size of the image, but the only software that would make full use of even one of these processors would be in-house and closed-source.

This actually onyl partially true.  The code for interfacing with the DMAC is hardware specific, but the actual vector code itself can be written in C, which when written in the proper way is easy to optimize on a per-platform basis and is something that developers have had to do for the last 10 or 20 years anyhow.

If Sony had decided that, like the EE VU's, we had to write code for them in assembler, you would be completely correct.  But luckily....they've decided to use C with some groovy compiler intrinsics to make the job much more manageable.  Take a look at http://www.codeplay.com/ to learn more.

Thus with careful attention to the requiremenbts of multi-platform coding, it's not that big a job after all.

Literally 99.9% of users don't require two processing cores, let alone 8+, at any clockspeed.

Well....I think the majority of users, who more than lilkely like to play games would benefit greatly from having a dual processor/dual core machine.  Deffered rendering happening in one thread, while the other processes the game code for the next frame...or maybe somebody wants to process thier childs christening video while being able to browse the web without thier system locking up due to a high priority processes .

See... reasons why multiple processors are a good idea   But that's just my take on it...

[stigmata]

A single piece of software with 32 concurrent threads? Good luck...

You're acting like parallel processing is some sort of black art.  Just because you understand very little or nothing at all about the skills involved, doesn't mean that it's impossible to do. 

Oh no, I just got insulted by the guy that doesn't even know the specs of the hardware he proports to code for...

Parallel processing isn't a black art of any kind, but even the most retarded monkey realises that it's impossible to make good use of 8 cores simultaneously unless all 8 of them are working to their maximum potential, constantly - that's a shitload of processing, spread evenly among at least eight independent threads. Even for gaming, the most you'll look at is one thread for rendering, one for audio, one for AI, and one for physics.

maybe somebody wants to process thier childs christening video while being able to browse the web without thier system locking up due to a high priority processes .

Funny, really, how I can already do that - you know, since I'm encoding christening video's all the freakin' time. </sarcasm>

[Knightslugger]

here we go again....  I think i'll just sit and watch this time...

[DarkChronic]

here we go again....  I think i'll just sit and watch this time...

Should be a good match. 

[Shmi]

here we go again....  I think i'll just sit and watch this time...

yeah, me too.