I wonder if this is due to the fact that the Playstation hardware is (was?) competitively priced to encourage revenue generation through games? Or was Sony simply very good at mass-producing these units?
The whole point of OtherOS (and the official Linux port to the PS2 before this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2 ) was to get the system classified as a general purpose computer rather than as a game console because that gave them import tax benefits in quite a few jurisdictions.
Pretty sure that was due to it being used to hack the PS3.
> Blame for the latest culling has been pinned on computer hacker George Hotz, who was originally infamous for unlocking Apple's iPhone. In January of this year Hotz claimed that he had successfully hacked Sony's PS3 by exploiting Linux, gaining "read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV [hyper-visor] level access to the processor".
> Hotz released this to the public on 26 January, boasting, "Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit". He may well have been right, since Sony's latest response has been to completely lock off the required 'Install Other OS' feature. Shame on pirates, shame on Sony.
Sony absolutely adored that supercomputer project if you lived through this period and followed the company; the idea that the cell processor was a supercomputer for the living room and we'd all be using our PS3s for media editing etc was genuinely a thought Sony had back then. It all fed into much of the (at times ridiculous) marketing for the Cell chip. Sony had plans for more Cell based devices that never materialized too.
> https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-gives-glimpse-of-ps3-...
"First, the company will manufacture a high-end workstation using the Cell CPU. Planned for release at the end of 2004... the Cell workstations will be marketed directly to the game and special-effects industries. The labor in their creation will be divided between Sony and IBM. SCE will develop middleware and other tools for game development and film effects. The Cell chips themselves will be manufactured by IBM, who will also work on the OS."
And Sony gets to sell their gaming console as "US Airforce proven" or "a supercomputer in a box" or whatever marketing spin they want to put on it.
And it is only a couple thousand PS3s anyway, so it is a drop in the bucket.
I wonder if there was some behind the scenes stuff going on, maybe IBM worried or angry that this would devalue Cell processors somehow.
The main risk would have been that more companies buy PS3 without buying subsized consoles without buying games. But due to the highly specialized architecture I'm not sure if there was ever a real risk of that happening.
The PS3 probably was the cheapest way to play with it in practice. There is a reason why modern GPUs share an architecture with video gamers.
It's not about technical advancement, as much as economics. There are two groups of people who want TFlops of SIMD compute. Supercomputer groups, and video gamers.
Cell / PS3 was one attempt at making one device work with both groups, sharing research and economic investment.
NVidia over the next 15 years would execute these economics better however.
And crypto people, unfortunately :(
Since then, consoles moved away from the exotic POWER/cell/etc custom hardware towards commodity x86 hardware based on integrated x86 APUs and haven't really been sold at a loss outside of maybe a small window at launch. PS5 moved into hardware profitability about 9 months after launch, microsoft said that the xbox series is still sold at a loss but I don't believe them because the xbox shouldn't be monumentally more expensive to build than the PS5. This is in the context of them trying to argue during the apple app store lawsuit that their lock-in on xbox store was different from the lock-in on the app store, so they have a financial incentive to make sure they "run a loss". It's either not much of a loss, or it's hollywood accounting and the money is going into their other pocket somewhere, like making the xbox division pay a parent holding company big licensing fees for on every console sold.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns...
(again, I don't agree with the "finally" spin here, this article was roughly a year after launch and they may have been turning a profit for a while before disclosing it... the consoles themselves become profitable pretty quickly.)
However, this mindset that "consoles are sold at an initial loss" still persists. They're not, Sony has said they're selling the PS5 at a profit. Previous generations also reached profitability pretty quickly after launch as well. It's not 2005 anymore and the ps3 is gone. Slapping some GDDR5/GDDR6 on a semi-custom APU is dirt cheap.
Even during the launch window when they do lose money it's much smaller, nobody is losing a couple hundred dollars on each console anymore like on the PS3, that model is gone.
That said though, the original PS3 hardware was definitely sold at a negative margin and wouldn't be profitable until four years into the console's life.
Article from 2010 talking about how the PS3 hardware had only just become profitable: https://www.pcworld.com/article/512740/article-4244.html
The console released in 2006.
By 2010? Likely both.
I'm not really a pacifist but there is something profoundly unsettling about real-life Call of Duty.
About the most stiff-necked branch of the U.S. military is the Navy. I'd be more surprised if the Navy approved a PS3 supercomputer, especially if it were to be run aboard ship.
Big caveat there. Sony later removed the ability to install "OtherOS" (a.k.a. Linux or FreeBSD) on PS3s from those models. [0] I wonder if that firmware update basically neutered the supercomputer or if they were able to keep them from updating automatically.
2. I'm sure they had a support contract, which may have included running an entirely different firmware. I have no specific knowledge, but based on other supercomputers I've worked with, these are often very custom machines, despite the "commodity" hardware. The odds that they were running the consumer version of the firmware are low to nil.
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2011/03/rome_labs_supercompute...
> Rome Lab asked the Department of Defense for $2.5 million to assemble its supercomputer. By the time money to buy that many was approved in 2009, PlayStation 3s were hard to find. Rome Lab bought as many as they could — 1,700.
Part of the reason why PS4 & Xbox later pivoted towards x86-64 ISA
And the 360 didn’t use SPEs, it has a pretty standard 3-core CPU built out of the PPE. The weird-ass structure of the CBE was not why it switched (although PPC might be).
Afaik PS3s were sold at a loss for Sony, so it seems likely that they were very beefy computationally wise, but I am use USAF could have gotten an incredible deal with Intel, IBM or AMD, so what is it?
Michael Van de Luur of Gorilla Games said in an interview [1] “Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy, is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell. I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.”
[1] https://www.gtplanet.net/playstation-3-cell-more-powerful-mo...
Just imagining an Air Force employee (?) browsing community modding forums and such for older firmware and tools, kinda funny.
Subsequent consoles dropped the "sell the hardware at a loss, make it up on games" model, they only lose money during a brief window at launch and then economies of scale take over and most of the console life it's profitable. It's likely that other kinds of hardware also share this model but we just don't hear about it - steam deck is running tight margins and day-1 sales are more expensive than the "average" unit sold mid-gen or late-gen, so similarly they are probably selling day-1 units at a loss even if they make a profit on the expected cost.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns...
Of course... even though sony is selling the hardware at a profit, they still maintain the lock-in, just like apple/etc. The linux feature never came back even though the reason for the removal went away.
OtherOS was a fully supported feature on the PS3, that enabled you to install Linux on a secondary partition on the built in HDD. At least until George Hotz used it to get hypervisor access and exploit the PS3.
This lead to the feature being removed and him being sued by Sony.
That's the problem of building something super-cutting-edge on a grand scale - you run the risk of making a super evolved version of an evolutionary dead end.
Sure it sounds like a cool idea at the time, the Cell optimized SETI At Home demo around the PS3 launch ripped through work units far more quickly than any Intel system.
I wonder what became of the cluster once it was decommissioned? Military surplus PS3s anyone?
If you make a beefy processor that works like a microcontroller - reading and writing everything from SRAM, and making all main memory DMA explicit - you get all the speed a fraction of the logic budget.
If you look at a modern CPU pipeline, it's 20ish stages, with most of them about handling the aforementioned complexities, with fetch-decode-execute taking up at most like 6 of them. In MCUs (and SPEs) it's basically all there is.
Unfortunately they never did figure out how to write programs for such a curiosity in an accessible manner.
I'm curious if it's worth taking another crack at this architecture, this time with better tooling.
You might as well be talking about magic when it comes to quantum computing and me, I have no idea if that new openssh standard really does protect against a quantum computer trying to break it.
1. https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-claims-to-have-mapped-out...
I bet 1,760 chickens cost roughly 5-10% of the cost of a Clydesdale, but I know which one I'd prefer to pull a cart.
I remember in college we had a lab full of PS3s because they were cheap and powerful and there was a course you could take to learn to develop on them. The lab later expanded after a big donation from nvidia of high end gaming machines to teach students CUDA.
The courses sucked though, because everyone would take them just to get access to the labs.
The PS3 could be used as a computer, this allowed sony to pay less taxes in the EU. Since it is such a closed platform the "install other OS" feature could be disable remotely by the vendor automatically and, I think, without any user intervention. When it became economically "better" for sony, they disable the feature.
These are good examples of the problems with such closed systems.
To be fair, he could have been more upfront about it. Some marketing managers would have shown that at E3.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l3hp2i/did_s...
https://www.techspot.com/news/93980-14800-asrock-mining-rig-...
