Sony's Playstation 3 may have another trick up it's sleeve. Words from Sony indicate that the optional hard disc will come with Linux installed, in at least one version of this add-on. Sony appears to be saying that for ordinary gameplay a hard disc is not needed, but that for other features, preumably the media center stuff a hard disc will be.
Running Linux would be a lot cheaper for Sony, than using a Windows derivative, assuming MS would wish to supply such a thing. Opinion
This makes a lot of sense for Sony. The PS2 has done extremely well without a HDD, in fact the lack of HDD has hardly held the machine back. I think Sony rightly feels that for most casual gaming the hard disc is un-necessary.
What makes this more interesting is the thought of Linux, or the 'other' Operating systems alluded to in the article, running on the PS3. Given the USB ports and all the other connectivity, PS3 runs the risk of being an actual computer, not a console.
If Sony chooses to partner with another organization, this could be a real win/win for both parties. For example, IBM have a huge Linux investment, the PS3 is a fixed hardware platform. Developing a stable Linux based system would hardly be difficult. Anticipate whatever they do deliver to be locked down tight though. A console skips past all of the support and patching issues of PCs because it is a fixed environment and tightly controlled. Opening up the system configuration at a low level, to the user is begging for trouble. I expect any OS delivered will be locked down and patching mechanisms will be very much behind the scenes.
The flip side is that by creating a standard fixed OS, home applications for photo processing, music, movies and other home media/browsing tasks have a single target to aim at, and more time and effort can go into making applications stable.
On a final note, I wish Sony would stop calling this thing a super computer. 25 GFLOP double precision is nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but it is not super computer territory. Put 40 cells in close proximity and you get 1000 GFLOP double precision performance, which would be super computer scale. Coming back down to earth and looking at the single precision performance of the PS3, (and the X360), the numbers are very respectable. I think it's fair to ignore the GPUs and concentrate on the CPUs for this. But the Cell with something in the order of 220GFLOPS single precision performance is quite respectable (Xenon gets in the region of 80 single precision GFLOPS - also respectable). The distinction between single and double precision is important. For real world math calculations and simulations (for example climate models) double precision is required. So measuring super computers in anything short of double precision is simply not relevent. In games single rpecision is generally good enough, so you can measure performance in a meaningful way using single precision GFLOP figures. On the strength of this, 220GFLOPS is damned good. It might not figure on the planets top 100 super computers today, but go back a couple of years....Either way, it's misleading to keep throwing out the 'supercomputer' tag.
~Highlander
Running Linux would be a lot cheaper for Sony, than using a Windows derivative, assuming MS would wish to supply such a thing. Opinion
This makes a lot of sense for Sony. The PS2 has done extremely well without a HDD, in fact the lack of HDD has hardly held the machine back. I think Sony rightly feels that for most casual gaming the hard disc is un-necessary.
What makes this more interesting is the thought of Linux, or the 'other' Operating systems alluded to in the article, running on the PS3. Given the USB ports and all the other connectivity, PS3 runs the risk of being an actual computer, not a console.
If Sony chooses to partner with another organization, this could be a real win/win for both parties. For example, IBM have a huge Linux investment, the PS3 is a fixed hardware platform. Developing a stable Linux based system would hardly be difficult. Anticipate whatever they do deliver to be locked down tight though. A console skips past all of the support and patching issues of PCs because it is a fixed environment and tightly controlled. Opening up the system configuration at a low level, to the user is begging for trouble. I expect any OS delivered will be locked down and patching mechanisms will be very much behind the scenes.
The flip side is that by creating a standard fixed OS, home applications for photo processing, music, movies and other home media/browsing tasks have a single target to aim at, and more time and effort can go into making applications stable.
On a final note, I wish Sony would stop calling this thing a super computer. 25 GFLOP double precision is nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but it is not super computer territory. Put 40 cells in close proximity and you get 1000 GFLOP double precision performance, which would be super computer scale. Coming back down to earth and looking at the single precision performance of the PS3, (and the X360), the numbers are very respectable. I think it's fair to ignore the GPUs and concentrate on the CPUs for this. But the Cell with something in the order of 220GFLOPS single precision performance is quite respectable (Xenon gets in the region of 80 single precision GFLOPS - also respectable). The distinction between single and double precision is important. For real world math calculations and simulations (for example climate models) double precision is required. So measuring super computers in anything short of double precision is simply not relevent. In games single rpecision is generally good enough, so you can measure performance in a meaningful way using single precision GFLOP figures. On the strength of this, 220GFLOPS is damned good. It might not figure on the planets top 100 super computers today, but go back a couple of years....Either way, it's misleading to keep throwing out the 'supercomputer' tag.
~Highlander
